


Anchored

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Action/Adventure, Addiction, Alien Technology, Angst, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Deliberate Re-injury, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Force Bond, Self-Destructive Behavior, Shaving Kink, Tech Horror, Telepathic Bond, The Force, ancient religion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26765896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: If anyone can survive an unwanted telepathic bond with Grand Admiral Thrawn, it's Faro.(She hopes.)
Relationships: Karyn Faro/Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Comments: 91
Kudos: 120





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have an outline written, but I have no idea how often this'll be updated XD
> 
> (also pssst, anyone here from the SGU fandom? anyone remember Force Over Distance? if not, don't worry about it. if yes, this is 1000% just Force Over Distance with Thraro instead. someone @cleanwhiteroom for me)

“ _How many men_ ,” said Thrawn’s voice over comm, “ _are trapped inside?_ ”

Faro winced, keeping her eyes on the ancient temple before her. Stormtroopers had cordoned it off now, but their cordon was constantly moving — just like the temple itself. She lifted her comlink to her lips.

“Twenty-nine, sir,” she said. “One confirmed death. And we’re losing contact with the others. Ensign Yully is still on-line, do you want me to patch you through?”

There was a pause. From Thrawn’s end she heard the ear-aching static of a comlink in motion and knew he was heading back to the temple as quickly as the dense ice-covered growth of the forest would let him.

“ _Not yet_ ,” said Thrawn, his voice clipped. “ _Patch me through to the linguistics team_.”

Lieutenant Drodson and his band of petty officers were already standing nearby, and at Thrawn’s words, Drodson pushed a diminutive Mid-Rimmer forward.

“Petty Officer Irick, sir,” she said into Faro’s comm. There was a beat of static as Thrawn either paused to think or to beat his way through the underbrush. Faro turned to face the forest, watching the frost-tipped leaves sway and undulate in the wind. 

“ _Your specialty is in ancient languages of the Outer Rim, yes?_ ” Thrawn said to Irick.

“Yes, sir.”

“ _Have you deciphered any of the text on the temple walls?_ ”

The _ever-shifting_ temple walls, Faro thought with a grimace. The temple had stayed stationary long enough for the survey team to complete its scans and deem the area safe for exploration. Only once they were inside had the mutasteel walls started moving, trapping them inside. 

“Yes, sir, I have,” said Irick. “But not precisely. It looks like a dialect of Ancient Skimscrip, sir, most likely used by an off-shoot of a dead religion.”

“ _Dead religion?_ ” Thrawn repeated. His voice was clearer now, the static dissolving. He must be getting close, Faro thought. 

“A religious order called the Ecclethes, sir,” said Irick. “An offshoot of the Jedi.”

Faro turned to face Irick at that, and as a result, she missed the precise moment that the ice-coated jungle parted to reveal Thrawn and his small team of surveyors. He was at her side in a moment, frost touching the edges of sleeves and hair. He held his hand out palm-up, silently requesting Irick’s datapad, and she handed it to him at once.

Thrawn read over the rudimentary translations quickly, his eyes blitzing from one line to the next.

“It will consume their life energy,” he read, voice level, “and leave their flesh behind. Is there any other likely translation?”

Irick hesitated, glancing back at her team of equally-cowed petty officers. 

“Speak freely,” Thrawn told her. “Do not be afraid to speculate.”

Still, Irick swallowed before she answered, her eyes darting anywhere but at Thrawn. “The word order isn’t set in stone yet,” she said. “The nouns are simple, but the verbs are not. It _could_ be saying it will consume their life energy; it could also be saying that those trapped inside will consume the life energy of something — or someone — else, or it could be saying something other than ‘consume,’ entirely, but we don’t think so.”

Thrawn didn’t ask about the second sentence — the flesh left behind. He scanned through the rest of the report and then glanced up, eyeing the ever-changing temple walls. He watched the mutasteel transform, the walls shifting size and length and shape in one smooth motion.

“And this last bit you’ve translated,” he said. “That the temple will release its prisoners if given a vessel. What can you tell me about that?”

“Vessel, sir,” said Irick, jumping on that last part with an eagerness that made it clear to Faro this was the only word she had a true grasp on. “By that it means something similar to what we would call a pilot or a caretaker—”

“Or a host,” Thrawn said.

Irick blinked. She looked at Thrawn, studying his face, but Thrawn kept his eyes fixed on the temple. “Or a host,” Irick agreed. “Someone to care for the temple, or perhaps maintain it.”

“And this person would be permitted to leave the temple afterward?” Thrawn asked, handing the datapad back.

Faro didn’t like where this was going.

“From what we can tell, sir,” said Irick. “There’s a room on the far side of the temple—” Thrawn was already striding toward it. Irick, who had raised her arm to point the way, let it drop again and gave Faro a hesitant look.

Faro brushed past her without a word. She hurried after Thrawn, fighting her way through the waist-high grass that grew all around the temple, each blade rimmed in ice. She’d never seen so much life on an ice planet before, she thought as she caught up with Thrawn. 

Together, the two of them made their way to the other side of the temple, where the stormtrooper cordon was standing far back from the walls. Here, the mutasteel had parted like the petals of a flower, leaving them with a clear view of the room inside. There were no men here, where the temple was open — only a single, nondescript metal chair.

“A throne,” Thrawn said, sounding puzzled.

Faro shook her head, unable to speak. To her, it didn’t look like a throne at all. 

It looked like an electric chair.

She was still staring at it, her throat dry, when Thrawn lifted his comlink. “Ensign Yully,” he said. “This is Grand Admiral Thrawn. Describe your whereabouts.”

Neither of them betrayed any anxiety as they waited for a reply. Ensign Yully’s voice, when it came, wasn’t quite his own.

“ _Fine inside_ ,” he said, with a hum in his throat like the stridulation of an insect. Static warped his words, drawing out each syllable and crushing others together all at once. “ _FFFFine inside, Grad. Gradmiral. Grand Admiral. Fine inside, sir. Come on in._ ”

Thrawn turned his head exactly one centimeter to the left so he could meet Faro’s eyes. “ID number, Ensign Yully,” he said. 

Static crackled and wailed over the comm. Ensign Yully didn’t answer — and around the throne room, the temple continued to mutate, its walls never stopping. The ancient steel drew itself up to form towers and spires, then drew itself back down again at the same pace, forming low, alien-looking pods. Through it all, the throne room remained unchanged.

“Has anyone tried sitting in it?” Thrawn asked tonelessly, securing his comlink on his belt. Faro looked from the chair to Thrawn, unable to hide her horror.

“Sir?” she said.

He took this answer, correctly, as a no. “I think perhaps someone should try,” he said, his voice level. He scanned the ground, looking over the stormtrooper cordon. “How well have these boundaries been tested?” he asked, nodding at a length of red twine strung at chest-height around the temple. 

“They’re almost completely arbitrary, sir,” said Faro. “I wouldn’t get any closer if I were—”

Thrawn took a careful step back — and as his right foot came down, the ground beneath him broke apart, grass and clumps of dirt scattering. A solid pillar of material that gleamed like dull, dirty metal rose to meet him from beneath the ground, breaking through the earth to press against the bottom of Thrawn’s foot. Before he had time to even glance down and see what had touched him, the metal pillar seemed almost to pulsate, and Thrawn was pushed forward into the red twine. 

“Sir!” Faro barked, the word wrenched from her throat in a moment of panic. Her hand shot out of its own volition, closing around Thrawn’s arm and pulling him back again before he could catch his balance. He stumbled against her but didn’t even look her way; his eyes were fixed studiously on the broken ground.

“Arbitrary indeed,” he said, his voice mild. “It seems the temple is perfectly capable of shifting beneath the earth.”

He looked up, Faro’s fingers still closed around his arm, and scrutinized the still-changing temple. “The mass we see aboveground has not transformed, but not lessened,” he said — though how he could tell just by looking at the shifting spires and walls, Faro didn’t know. “That means…?”

Cursing under her breath, Faro let go of his arm and studied the broken earth, trying to figure out what he wanted her to say. “Mass can’t be created or destroyed by physical transformation,” she said, looking from the fresh hole in the ground to the temple. “If the mass of mutasteel aboveground really hasn’t decreased, like you said, sir, then it means there must be an extended network of mutasteel that we can’t even see underground.”

“Yes,” said Thrawn, lifting his comlink to his lips. “Which means our men could be anywhere.” He thumbed the mic on. “Lieutenant Pyrondi.”

“ _Sir_ ,” came Pyrondi’s voice at once.

“Switch to the three-dimensional imaging scanner for underground use,” Thrawn said. “We believe there is a network of mutasteel spreading out beneath the fields. Map it and send it back to me as soon as possible.”

“ _Sir_ ,” said Pyrondi again. 

Thrawn cut the comm, stepping away from the broken earth. He was heading back toward the cordon of stormtroopers when the ground broke before him again. This time, Thrawn was ready, gracefully sidestepping the pillar of mutasteel that shot twenty centimeters out of the ground. The pillar stayed there for a moment, barely peeking over the surface of grass and earth, and then disappeared.

“What’s it doing?” Faro asked, her eyebrows furrowed.

Thrawn didn’t respond. He tried to go around the second hole in the ground and was prevented, this time by a wall of mutasteel that shot up nearly half a meter in front of him. He turned, frowning at Faro in passing, and faced the throne room.

“Sir?” Faro prompted.

“It’s corralling me,” said Thrawn calmly, and at that exact moment, mutasteel shattered the earth all around him. Dull grey walls shot up above Faro’s head, blocking Thrawn completely from her view. She leaped forward by instinct, pounding on the walls, and felt it give unnaturally beneath each blow; it assumed the shape of her fist, absorbing the force she used against it, and muted every sound.

The stormtroopers rushed forward as well, their blasters raised.

“Don’t shoot!” Faro said. She stepped away from the steel walls, scanning them frantically. They were perhaps tall enough to scale, but that could change any moment. “Sir?” she yelled, her voice strained.

“I’m alright,” said Thrawn, his voice no more ruffled than it had been a moment ago. He sounded thoughtful; Faro imagined him running his hands over the inside of the walls, gathering information tactilely. “There is a tunnel ahead of me, Commodore, which leads directly to the throne room.”

Faro glanced at the temple, saw the mutasteel walls extending all the way to the foundation. She could no longer see the so-called throne room at all; the mutasteel from underground had sealed it off from everybody but Thrawn. 

“Stay where you are,” she said, her heart pounding. 

“I certainly will try to,” said Thrawn dryly. Faro fumbled with her comlink.

“Commander Peirtson, we need the explosives squad—”

The mutasteel walls around Thrawn shifted; the one closest to Faro slid neatly away from her, leaving crushed grass and melting frost in its wake. Soon, it reached the spot where Thrawn had been standing and slowly rolled past it, leaving the spot empty and bare.

She heard Peirtson responding to her order, asking questions, but she couldn’t concentrate on them. Her eyes were on the shifting tunnel that was gently but stubbornly nudging Thrawn closer to the throne. Inside, out of her sight, she could imagine Thrawn stepping forward as necessary, every time the walls inched closer and brushed against his back. 

As the tunnel’s length shrank one centimeter at a time, the walls grew correspondingly higher, cutting off all chance of scaling them to rescue Thrawn. 

“ _Commodore_ ,” he said.

It took Faro a moment to realize that the voice now came from her comlink. She stepped over the snapped red twine, following the tunnel as much as she dared. “Sir,” she said levelly, or as levelly as she could manage. “What’s your status?”

There was a blast of static over the comlink as the walls pulsated. She heard the sizzle of electricity both over the comlink and in real life, not far from her. A moment later, sounding disgruntled, Thrawn said,

“ _I have attempted to resist. It is … suboptimal._ ”

 _Suboptimal?_ Faro’s eyes raked over the mutasteel, trying to figure out exactly what Thrawn meant. As if he could read her thoughts, he said,

“ _It’s thrown me forward twice_.” He sounded calm, but somewhat breathless, as if he’d hit the ground hard. “ _The mutasteel is an excellent conductor for electricity as well._ ”

Faro’s gut twisted at that. She watched the walls, noticing for the first time a faint blue glimmer that seemed to ripple through them at will. 

“ _I’m going to walk toward the throne room more quickly now,_ ” said Thrawn, his voice still eerily calm. 

“Sir—”

“ _If I attempt to resist much longer_ ,” said Thrawn flatly, “ _I will not maintain consciousness. It seems inevitable that I enter the throne room, willingly or not. As such I would like to reach that outcome with the least amount of personal injury._ ”

He said it all matter-of-factly, the same way he gave orders in the middle of battle — and the same way he thanked Faro any time she brought him a cup of caf. She felt a sort of helpless humming sensation settle into her arms and legs, a useless surge of adrenaline that had nowhere to go.

“Stand back,” she said to the stormtroopers, her lips numb. 

She watched the tunnel shrink, ushering Thrawn closer and closer to the throne room. The walls smoothed out, the mutasteel re-joining itself with the rest of the temple, and she knew Thrawn must have stepped inside. Soon, the only trace left of the tunnel was the broken earth and flattened stems of grass it left behind. 

She approached the wall, scarcely able to breathe. Dimly, she was aware of others crowding around her — members of the survey party, stormtroopers, linguists — all of them careful not to come quite so close to the mutasteel as Faro was. 

Her comlink buzzed.

“ _Commodore, I’m having trouble reaching the admiral_ ,” said Pyrondi, her voice calm. “ _I’ll transmit the scanner data to you_.”

Automatic as it was, Faro didn’t hear her own response. She watched as the wall in front of her shifted slightly, seeming almost to breathe. Then, before her eyes, the mutasteel stretched — like it was unzipping itself, like it was made of fibers that were slowly being pulled apart — and a tiny slit of a window opened before her in the wall.

She saw only Thrawn’s boots at first, planted firmly on the floor. As the hole in the wall expanded, she saw more. The position of his legs, which let her know he was already sitting in the chair. The mutasteel bands snaking around his ankles, holding him in place. The bolts that had drilled straight through his boots, disappearing into the leather and leaving traces of blood—

Oh, Faro realized almost numbly. The bolts hadn’t just gone through his boots, then. They’d gone straight through his ankles.

As the gap in the wall widened, she saw his hands cuffed tightly to the arms of the chair — the mutasteel bolts boring through his wrists — the sheen of energy all around him, like that of a bubble shield — his closed eyes, his upright posture.

The bolts screwing into his temples.

Faro swallowed, her throat impossibly dry. She felt a stormtrooper brush past her, approaching the sheen of translucent blue energy before him. He unstrapped the armored plate over his shoulder and held it out, touching the wall of energy that surrounded Thrawn. With a deafening buzz-hiss of electricity, the shield sent the shoulder plate flying backward.

“Stand back,” Faro told him, her voice coming out professional but hollow. She turned, studying the people around her, and held her comlink to her lips. “Ensign Yully,” she called.

“ _Ma’am_ ,” came the response right away, static-free and sounding awed. “ _I can’t talk. There’s a tunnel up ahead that leads straight to the forest._ ”

She thumbed over to the next call code, letting Yully pursue his escape at will. The other twenty-eight men responded the same way — responded for the first time since they’d been swallowed up by the temple — and reported the same as Ensign Yully. Light ahead — or sky for some — or the frost-covered fields. But either way, all of them could see nature again, rather than the cold grey mutasteel walls.

The temple was letting them go. 

She turned back to Thrawn, heart thudding in her chest. The throne room had opened completely, with only two obstacles remaining in her way. The first was the energy shield, which kept Thrawn confined to his chair and the rest of them from rescuing him. The second was a small podium of mutasteel that seemed to have grown right out of the floor in front of Faro.

Ancient Skimscrip snaked over every centimeter of the podium, the foreign letters glimmering in the light. In the center of it, untouched by the Skimscrip, was what looked like a human handprint, the fingers extended, the palm smooth and unlined. It pulsated gently, shimmering with an almost unnoticeable light.

“Petty Officer Irick,” Faro called, her voice clipped. Behind the energy shield, Thrawn failed to respond to the sound of her voice. His eyes didn’t flutter open; his chest moved slowly and evenly, as if he were asleep. Or unconscious, Faro thought.

Or in a trance.

She swallowed these anxieties down as Petty Officer Irick stepped up beside her, already examining the podium. Irick’s eyes flickered from each alien letter and then back to her datapad, drawing each one with a light-pen. The database whirred, churning out a nonsensical stream of words that Irick painstakingly rejected, changed, cross-referenced and reorganized. 

“Forgive me, ma’am,” she murmured, though Faro was waiting patiently. “I’m going as fast as I can. It’s just…”

“Take your time,” Faro assured her. She kept her eyes fixed on Thrawn — on the minute twitches and flexes of his face, on the thin trickles of blood trailing down his jawline and over his ears. 

He couldn’t survive this, she thought, feeling ill. He’d be lobotomized, even if he did. The bolts were screwing tighter into his temples with every second, slowly and inexorably piercing his brain. God only knew just what the mutasteel was doing inside him — what organs it was creeping into, which neural pathways it had already destroyed. 

“It says—” said Irick, then hesitated. She glanced up from the datapad, staring at the pulsating handprint with an expression Faro couldn’t read. “It says the vessel may leave only when it is anchored,” Irick said. “The word ‘anchor’ includes the root for the word ‘hand.’ I think…”

She gestured toward the handprint, looking sick. Faro’s mind whirred.

“But how can we—” She glanced at Thrawn, trapped behind an energy wall, with mutasteel boring through his skin. If Thrawn needed to touch this podium, why hadn’t the temple positioned it closer to him? Would it let him go, or—

She sucked in a sharp breath. 

“Stand back, Petty Officer,” she said.

Irick took a step backward even as she shot Faro a hesitant, questioning glance. Faro ignored it; her eyes were on Thrawn — on the shifting mutasteel at his temples, wrists, and ankles — at the flickers of electricity skimming over his skin. She watched his head twitch back, pressing his skull against the steel backing of the chair; his lips curled back in an unconscious grimace; she saw mutasteel lacing between his gums, electricity dancing across his teeth. 

She placed her palm flat against the handprint on the podium before her and watched the Skimscrip flash bright white before fading away.

The walls stopped shifting.

The mutasteel beneath her hand went still and cold.

Faro looked up, not daring to pull her hand away. Across the room, she watched the energy shield flicker and hum before it died entirely, and only then did Faro find the motivation to move. She raced forward just as the mutasteel cuffs around Thrawn’s arms and legs melted away; by the time she reached his chair, she could hear the grinding of metal against bone and saw the bolts in his wrists and ankles gradually drawing out.

Blood trickled from all four wounds, leaving red stains on his uniform sleeves and dripping down the leather of his boots. Gingerly, Faro touched Thrawn’s shoulder and felt a zap of static electricity against her skin; beneath his uniform he was cold, like the frost-covered jungle outside. She examined his wrists, found the blood flow slow and thick, already coagulating. Carefully, she worked her fingers through the hole in the fabric of his sleeve, stretching it wider.

The bolts in his temples were the last to go, and by the time they pulled out, Faro was ready, pressing her Imperial-issue pocket square against the wound on Thrawn’s left temple and a scrap from his own torn sleeve to his right. The blood flow here was harsher, as she’d suspected it would be, and she gritted her teeth as both scraps of cloth were soaked through.

The stormtroopers rushed in behind her, bringing with them a stretcher from the shuttle, but Faro wouldn’t back away to give them space. She stayed in front of Thrawn, her feet planted and her hands pressed to his temples, willing him to wake up. 

_Come on,_ she thought, biting her lip. _Come on._

She peeled the blood-soaked pocket square away from his temple. Her thumb brushed his forehead, and she watched, entranced, as a spark of blue electricity sizzled harmlessly between the pad of her thumb and his cool skin. 

And then, though his eyes were closed and his lips weren’t moving, she heard him say, _I’m awake._


	2. Chapter 2

Thrawn slept through the transport, his trip to medbay, and the stripping of his uniform. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say he closed his eyes during these things — that he was immobile and dead weight whenever he was moved — and that he seemed unaware of the physical sensations around him.

But he _was_ awake, even if only Faro could tell. 

She didn’t mention it to anyone — and if they noticed how dazed she was, surely they chalked it up to worry — but from the moment they pulled Thrawn out of that chair to the moment they cleaned the blood off his skin in sick bay, she could feel the alien pressure of another mind pressing up against her own. 

When the medics swabbed blood from Thrawn’s temples using a too-warm rag, Faro could almost feel the discomfort herself. 

“Stop,” she told them, her voice sharp. Thrawn’s face remained slack with sleep, but the medic removed the rag from his temples, allowing Faro to feel it. “It’s too warm for him,” she said. “Run it under cold water.”

The pressure against her mind eased. She felt a flicker of relief when the medic returned and the now-cool rag was laid against Thrawn’s head. From Thrawn, she caught a series of things she couldn’t quite define, part-sensation and part-memory:

— _swimming_ — _fever_ — _home_ —

And then, as clear as day, a conscious thought in Thrawn’s voice:

_That’s right. I’ve fallen ill._

A mental image popped into her head unbidden, not created by her own mind: a small boy lying ill in bed, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. More sensations came with it like a salvo of enemy fire, each one piercing Faro’s consciousness like a headache: the bitter taste of medicine that doesn’t work; the fear of dying; the long trek across a glacial field at night to the midwife, secured in his father’s arms; the longing for an older sister who’s gone away. 

_No_ , Faro thought. She remembered earlier, how Thrawn responded to the combination of her thoughts and physical touch, and sidled up next to the medic as unobtrusively as she could. She rested her hand over Thrawn’s and furrowed her eyebrows in concentration. _You’re on the Chimaera, sir. You’re not ill._

 _Faro_.

His voice came to her faint, tinged with surprise and — Faro’s eyes widened — a bloom of slow, easy pleasure that she could feel in her own chest — the same warm pleasure she felt every time she met with an old friend.

Then, Thrawn’s voice again, sleepy and simultaneously ringing with conviction: _Dreaming_.

She could feel him thinking over the evidence — the cool cloth rubbing at his temples, which he could just barely feel, other than the temperature; the fact that he was lying on his back, which he somehow knew, even though he couldn’t tell if he was on a bed or on the floor or simply floating in space; the electric waves of pain that overtook him every now and then, emanating from his temples and wrists and ankles and spreading out through his entire body in a slow, agonizing crawl.

And then, with all this evidence processed and catalogued, Thrawn finally stirred. Faro watched a harsh line appear between his eyebrows as he finally heard the voices all around him for the first time, though he couldn’t concentrate well enough to make out the words.

 _That’s it,_ she told him, brushing her thumb tentatively over his knuckles. He felt it; he hadn’t felt her first touch, but now his attention zeroed in on it, analyzing the brush of human skin against his hand. She saw her own face swim before her eyes as he thought of her. 

_V’eostri_ , he thought, and with a sense of calm and relaxation, he opened his eyes, looking straight past the medic, at Faro. 

_V’eostri?_ asked Faro.

Thrawn frowned at her. She watched his eyes flicker down to her closed lips. He tilted his head away from the medic who was cleaning his temples, then lifted his hand and closed his fingers gently around the medic’s wrists, putting the distracting sensation of cloth against his skin to a stop. In the ensuing silence — or what felt like silence to Faro, through Thrawn’s mind — she could feel him tentatively feeling out his own brain, locating the tendrils of Faro’s mind inside his own.

Only there was no recognition there. He visualized her thoughts not as words or emotions but as foreign intruders — alien fingers picking through his mind.

“You?” he asked aloud, his voice a rasp, his eyes on her.

Slowly, Faro nodded. She could feel dread and distress rising in her and didn’t know who it came from — her or him. “Can you give us a moment?” she asked the medic.

He walked away without a word, and to Faro’s surprise, he passed the cool cloth to her as he left. She turned it over in her hands, hyper-aware of Thrawn’s eyes boring into her and the rapid-fire questions shooting through his brain.

“Is this something we can talk about at present?” he asked finally, his voice level.

Faro frowned at him; she knew what he meant — she could see the intention behind every word in his mind. What he meant was: _I don’t remember what happened. I don’t know why our minds are connected. Does anyone else know? Have you decided to keep it a secret? And why?_

“I haven’t told anyone,” she said aloud. “It’s … the chair. I think…”

The chair was unfamiliar to him. His eyes dropped to the one next to his hospital bed, where Faro had been quietly waiting for him to wake up. Before she could correct him, his thoughts redirected on their own, spooling backward over what he could remember — the nebulous fog of time he’d spent unconscious, and before that, the planet covered in frost, and the temple made of mutasteel, and his men trapped inside.

“They’re free now,” Faro told him softly when his mind got stuck on this, ticking over it again and again. “One casualty. Lieutenant—”

“—Orsun,” Thrawn finished for her in a murmur. “Crushed by the walls.”

“Yes.”

His face was blank and unbothered; his mind was churning, thinking with regret of Orsun’s talents, of his crew and the counseling they would require, of his belongings and who would go through them, who would clear out his quarters and send his possessions back home to his family. 

“Sir,” said Faro, interrupting his thought process. “Do you remember how you rescued the men?”

He looked at her sharply, but didn’t say anything. Perhaps he’d already realized he didn’t need to. She could feel the gap in his memory where the throne had been.

Closing her eyes, she filled in the blanks for him. Her memories pushed into his brain as gently as she could make them — the mutasteel walls shooting through the ground all around him, pushing him incessantly toward the throne room. The electricity shimmering over the chair, over his skin. The bolts grinding through the delicate bones in his wrists and ankles. The podium, the handprint, the Skimscrip.

The bond Faro had forced them into without really knowing what she was doing.

Thrawn accepted each memory without a flicker of emotion; his thoughts were visible to her, but opaque. Accidentally, without meaning to, Faro transmitted her own thoughts and emotions to him; she couldn’t quite manage to tamp down on them, not while she was transmitting images and sounds at the same time.

She watched his eyes flicker at her remembered anxiety — the certainty she’d felt that the mutasteel was boring through his skull, that tendrils of it were devastating his brain. With a sharp inhalation, Thrawn closed his eyes and lifted a hand, touching the wound on his right temple. 

“Unbandaged,” he commented, a spike of confusion and curiosity shooting through him at the same time. Then, when Faro didn’t respond immediately, he turned his head just slightly without moving his raised hand, and she saw him examining the white bandages wrapped firmly around his wrist. When he twisted his wrist, a sharp, jarring pain went up the bones of his arm; none of it showed on Thrawn’s face.

“The bacta wouldn’t take,” Faro told him, masking her anxiety as best she could. “We thought it had something to do with your species. Some species don’t heal under bacta at all.”

“I do,” said Thrawn simply. Then, looking at his wrist again, “Usually.”

He didn’t meet her eyes, but he sensed her spike of concern nonetheless. Faro wasn’t sure how; she could feel the knowledge of it assembling itself inside his brain. 

_She has the Sight,_ Thrawn thought. Then, in a thought that was somehow louder and clearer than what he’d just said, he said to Faro, _You can read my mind._

She started to open her mouth for a verbal response, then quelled the urge. _I can,_ she acknowledged. _I’m not sure how._

“We’ll get the linguistics team to sort it out,” said Thrawn dismissively. “A thorough examination of the Skimscrip over the podium should resolve it.”

Then, mentally, he added: _I can’t read yours._

Faro wasn’t sure what to say, or even how she felt about this. Part of her wasn’t surprised — she’d seen the way Thrawn reacted to her mind, the way he’d thought of it as an alien presence, how he’d failed to identify it as her. But it seemed so counter-intuitive that part of her was surprised, anyway. Thrawn was so cerebral and so quick to adapt that it seemed impossible to her that he couldn’t grasp this mental connection the same way she could.

He was watching her now, his face blank. Beneath the surface, she could feel frustration — and worse, a sense of helplessness and muted anxiety — boiling inside him. 

_Can you block me?_ Faro asked, trying to help.

 _I am attempting to do so,_ said Thrawn. He examined his wrists and tried to pick the bandages apart, but his fingers wouldn’t obey him. The frustration swelled and peaked, and she could feel him forcibly tamping it down. 

_It said I was to be your anchor,_ Faro told him.

 _I remember,_ he said. He tried futilely to peel back the bandages again, determined to see the wounds that were causing him so much pain. After a moment, Faro couldn’t watch him struggle any longer; she pulled her chair up next him, handing him the wet cloth.

“See to your temples,” she said aloud. “There’s still some dried blood near your hairline.”

His eyes flickered over her face, but he obeyed, holding the cloth to his head. Faro took his other hand in hers gently — mindful of the fluctuating pain level she could read from his mind — and unwrapped the bandages as slowly as she could, making sure not to jar Thrawn’s wrist or turn his hand over as she did so.

When the wound was exposed, Thrawn examined it clinically and with a genuine lack of emotion. “My datapad?” he asked. 

Faro handed him hers; she was more than willing to sacrifice it, and they had the same permissions. Besides, she had no idea where his was at the moment, and neither did he. Thrawn took it gingerly, his wrists screaming in protest at the weight. Gritting his teeth, he did his best to turn the datapad on and key it for information from the temple.

He couldn’t do it. He realized it was futile a full minute before he finally stopped trying; his fingers moved when he told them to, but never did quite what he wanted, and didn’t have the strength to hold the datapad for long or press the keys. 

_Can you stop?_ he asked levelly.

Faro blinked, tearing her eyes away from his strained wrists. “Stop?” she said.

 _Are you able to refrain from reading my mind?_ he asked. _Or is it an involuntary reflex?_

“It’s—”

Faro cut herself off. She would answer him mentally, as soon as she knew for herself what the answer was. Gradually, she pulled back from Thrawn’s mind as much as she could, letting go of his thoughts and turning a blind eye to his emotions.

It was possible, she discovered. She could almost mute him, until the only sensations she got were a vague sense of the fact that his mind existed. Up close, she could tell where he was, what he was seeing, what he felt and thought -- but far away, like she was now, all she knew was that he was alive and awake.

 _I can stop,_ she told him, and a shared relief nearly overwhelmed them both. Thrawn collapsed back against the mattress, pain radiating from his wrists and ankles; he held his arm out to her wordlessly and allowed her to rebandage the wound she’d uncovered moments before.

“Stay like this,” he murmured to her.

She looked up; his eyes were unreadable, and fixed on his wrist rather than on her. Faro’s mouth was dry; she thought of the temple, of the throne room — the podium declaring that Thrawn needed an anchor. For a moment, she thought Thrawn was asking her to stay with him, perhaps for comfort; only after a moment of thought did she realize that he was actually asking her to stay disconnected from his brain. To stay away.

“I will,” she told him. 

He nodded tersely, giving no outward sign of what he felt. When she’d finished with the bandages, he transferred the wet cloth from one hand to the other and wiped the remainder of blood away from his temples. At the same time, not glancing at Faro, he pushed the datapad toward her, balancing it on his knee.

She took it from him and keyed it to the reports he wanted to read.

He didn’t bother to ask her how she knew.


	3. Chapter 3

Faro was looking over Pyrondi’s shoulder at the sensor display when she felt a spike of emotion tugging her away. She stayed still, keeping her posture erect, and closed her eyes just briefly to concentrate on Thrawn.

She’d had him on mute — or something like it — while she worked, and she was vaguely aware of his location, the sick bay, but didn’t know much else. Now, she let the barricades between their minds lift, and felt a surge of relief as she did so, as if she’d finally dropped a heavy weight after carrying it on her back for hours. Thrawn’s thoughts and emotions surged toward her, giving her a clear view of his situation.

He sat upright in his hospital bed, his wrists and ankles throbbing with pain. The ensign he’d commandeered to work as his aide sat in the chair next to Thrawn’s bed, barely hiding a scowl as he worked on Thrawn’s datapad. 

“You can’t find it?” Thrawn asked, his voice measured and patient. 

“Give me a minute,” the ensign snapped — then flushed at his outburst, but didn’t apologize. Faro, on the bridge, could hardly hide her surprise or outrage, but Thrawn barely felt anything at all in response to it.

“Take your time,” he told the ensign. When the ensign said nothing in return, only growing more and more flustered as he searched for the file, Thrawn warred with himself over whether or not to offer more advice. Finally, in a toneless and unintentionally cold voice, he said, “It is labeled Aurek-Osk-Nern-56618. You will likely find it in the secure server. Select the Core World folder, then the Bormea Sector folder, then Chandrila system, then—”

“Sir,” the ensign snapped again, “I understand you’re in pain, but if you’d just let me concentrate—”

 _Out of line,_ Faro thought, with a spike of outrage. She drew away from Pyrondi’s station, unable to pretend that she was paying attention any longer. Thrawn’s tone had been perfectly polite; he hadn’t been nagging the ensign or condescending to him at all — and even if he had been, the ensign was an ensign and Thrawn was a grand admiral, and there was simply no excuse to speak to him in such a way.

In the hospital room, Thrawn said, “Of course, Ensign. Take your time.” 

His voice was polite, neutral. He was awash in cold anger; in an effort to ignore it, he turned his eyes away from the ensign and stared at the medical charts on the bulkhead across from him. He’d already memorized their contents. 

Faro took a deep breath, swallowed her own anger, and asked Thrawn, _You’re not going to reprimand him for that?_

 _Ensign Gralli is one of only two officers deemed nonessential by their supervisors, and therefore capable of assisting me until a permanent aide can be assigned,_ Thrawn said quite calmly. _I find it strategically wise not to antagonize him._

He was thinking, without emotion or embarrassment, of his current vulnerable state — unable to walk without the use of crutches, and even then not for long; unable to use a datapad or holopod without assistance; bedbound, and stuck in sick bay to boot. With this information in hand, Ensign Gralli could potentially cause quite a great deal of harm, though Thrawn didn’t seriously suspect him of planning a physical attack; rather, he was thinking of Gralli’s volatile personality, which Thrawn had deemed unsuitable for military service, and how such a volatile person might take offense at correction and attempt to humiliate or otherwise retaliate against his corrector as a result. It all fell into the realm of politics; Thrawn didn't quite understand the shame other officers might feel at being hospitalized, but he _did_ understand that his state might be used against him somehow, and he'd even vaguely identified a few Moffs and Admirals who might appreciate the information.

Faro digested this all, feeling sick. She pulled out of Thrawn’s mind just slightly and said to Pyrondi, “Excuse me for a moment.” Then, raising her voice, she said, “Commander Hammerly. You have the bridge.”

She made for sick bay as fast as she could, monitoring the situation through Thrawn’s mind eye as she did. She watched as Ensign Gralli, growing increasingly frustrated with his inability to find Thrawn’s file, tossed the datapad onto the hospital bed and sat back with a disgusted sigh.

“ _You_ find it, sir,” he said, his words only barely acceptable and his tone most certainly not. Thrawn picked up the datapad calmly, bending one knee and resting the pad against his thigh so he could see the screen without straining his wrists. Slowly, with fingers that wouldn’t quite obey his orders, he picked through his folders and found the file exactly where he’d said it would be.

He opened it without any ‘I told you so’s and shifted his leg a little, causing the datapad to slide off his lap and closer to the edge of the bed. His mind was a sea of scathing critiques on Gralli’s reading comprehension and attention to detail; his reluctance to follow a lawful order was at the forefront of Thrawn’s mind, with his poor reaction to criticism following after.

“If you could set it to scroll automatically,” said Thrawn evenly, “and then hand it back.”

Gralli barely managed not to roll his eyes, but did as requested. Thrawn had just gotten it balanced at a readable angle on his thigh when Faro stormed through the door.

The relief that surged through him at the sight of her almost knocked her off her feet. She weathered through it, a brief widening of her eyes the only sign that slipped through — and she only knew about that because she could see her own face through Thrawn’s mind. She shook the double-vision away. 

“Ma’am,” said Gralli almost sullenly, pushing to his feet.

Faro narrowed her eyes at him. He watched her awkwardly, not quite coming to attention, and waited for her to put him at ease. When she didn’t, he decided on his own that he didn’t need to stay standing and started to sit.

“Did I put you at ease, Ensign?” Faro snapped.

With a scowl, Gralli straightened his legs again. He shot an aggrieved look Thrawn’s way, as if it were his fault Faro was being short with him — and after a moment of private, vindictive amusement, Thrawn calmly returned Gralli’s gaze and said, “Dismissed to your supervisor, Ensign Gralli. I will check with him in twenty minutes to ensure you’ve arrived at your station.”

Gralli’s face had brightened at the word ‘dismissed,’ but darkened again at ‘to your supervisor’ and just kept darkening as Thrawn spoke. He brushed past Faro on his way out, not saying a word to her, and as soon as he was gone, Faro let her stiff military posture drop.

“It’s _unreal_ ,” she said, slumping into the empty seat next to Thrawn. “No wonder his supervisor said he was nonessential.”

“The other one’s not much better,” Thrawn said, his eyes fixed on the datapad and its auto-scrolling report. “Of course, this is hardly a prestigious position. We don’t want the Chimaera’s best and brightest stuck on…”

He gestured vaguely to his hospital bed. Faro heard the words he didn’t want to say aloud echoing through his thoughts: _babysitting duty_.

“They’re not babysitting you,” said Faro, exasperated. “It’s no different from being your aide, sir. And you’ve more than earned a decent aide; you don’t have to settle for the dregs of the ship.”

“We’ll have him transferred the moment we get back to Lothal, if we can,” Thrawn murmured. He kept his eyes on the datapad; she could feel an emotion she couldn’t quite identify stinging inside him. Displeasure, she thought, and perhaps also mild anger, but not at Gralli.

At _her_ , she realized belatedly. Because he’d stopped himself from saying something to her, and she’d eavesdropped on his mind and heard it anyway. She should have pretended not to hear him at all. 

She was just processing this when a third emotion entered the scene — mild guilt — and set her mind racing all over again. Thrawn’s face was the picture of concentration as he read through his report — and he was concentrating on it, she could tell — but deep in the back of his mind, there was a flare of guilt.

Guilt over what? Faro wondered. Over transferring Gralli?

Or was he feeling guilty because he was, however slightly, angry at her for reading his mind?

“You’re supposed to be on-duty,” Thrawn said, interrupting her thoughts. His tone was impossible to read, and might even have been taken as a reprimand if Faro couldn’t see exactly what he was really thinking: that he’d much rather have Faro for company than even the most competent ensign.

“I left Hammerly in charge,” Faro said, trying not to blush. “We’re sending a team of Kinos down to the temple. Did you look at the imaging results?”

He gave her a pained look and shifted the datapad toward her the same way he’d shifted it to Ensign Gralli. At the same time, a recent memory popped into his mind: Thrawn, sitting exactly where he was now and requesting the imaging results from Ensign Uoric, the other officer who’d been assigned as his aide while he was in sick bay. 

_I’ll check with the medics if that’s okay, sir,_ said Uoric dubiously. _They told me not to give you anything that’ll stress you out._

“I would appreciate it if you pulled them up,” said Thrawn in the present. Faro did so at once; she used Thrawn’s server as much as he did, and it took her no time at all to locate the files. She set them to project and held the datapad at an angle so Thrawn could see the maps without issue.

“The mutasteel stretches out underground for miles, as you can see, sir,” Faro said. Thrawn nodded, his eyes tracking over each line on the map. “As such, we’ve pulled all physical survey teams off the planet. They’re still working, sir, just remotely. Using the Kinos.”

Thrawn nodded, and Faro caught a spark of satisfaction from him — first of all for the sound choice she’d made in his absence, and second of all for the use of the Kinos, which were civilian-made hovering cameras Thrawn had fought with the quartermaster to put in supply. Unlike Imperial probe droids, which had the same stealth and hovering capabilities, the Kinos weren’t hardwired to download their findings on High Command’s HoloNet. 

Thrawn examined the imaging results a moment longer, then gestured for Faro to take them down. “What does it remind you of?” he asked.

Normally, Faro would wrack her brains trying to figure out where Thrawn was leading her. Now, she answered promptly and without thinking. “The roots of a tree, sir.”

He gave her an exasperated look, as if he knew she’d pulled that image straight from his head. 

“Well, it’s difficult to keep the barricade in place for long, sir,” Faro told him, truthfully but apologetically. 

Thrawn accepted this without argument, thinking absently that he’d noticed the strain on Faro’s face when she came in. Faro tried not to be offended by his memory of her haggard face. 

“When I ask you for your opinion, Commodore, I do want _your_ opinion,” Thrawn said mildly. “Not simply to hear my own thoughts echoed back at me.”

“Of course, sir,” said Faro with chagrin. But she _did_ think the mutasteel network looked like the roots of a tree. It was hard to see the system as anything else, now that the roots comparison had been made. Thrawn read this off her face and moved on.

“I’d like examples of the Ecclethes’ artwork, if any exists,” he told her. “And I’d also like samples from any culture using Ancient Skimscrip as a language. I can’t download them myself.” He raised his hands, showing her the bandages, and Faro nodded. “I’d also like for you to download the linguistic team’s files on Skimscrip,” Thrawn continued.

Faro did so, keying for the information on Thrawn’s datapad. As she waited for the files to download, she asked him, “Have you been keeping up with your meetings?”

Thrawn frowned at that, his eyes swiveling to stare at the medics, who were sequestered in their station on the other side of sick bay. “As much as I’m able,” he said. “I disabled the video feed, citing our location as an excuse in order to avoid questions. If anyone comms you, be sure to tell them our signal is weak.”

“Of course,” said Faro with a smile. 

“I am also hindered by Ensign Gralli’s low clearance level,” Thrawn told her. “He does not have authorization to listen in on many of my calls; nor _should_ he have, or I would grant it to him at once.”

“You can’t have him make the call for you and then leave the room?” asked Faro.

Thrawn’s face soured at that. “The medics haven’t spoken to you?” he asked, turning to face her again.

Faro couldn’t help but frown. She tried to read Thrawn’s mind, but he repelled her expertly — all his thoughts were in a language Faro didn’t recognize, leaving her with access to nothing but his emotions and a few brief snippets of memory.

“There seems to be some leftover energy from the temple in my system still,” Thrawn told her. “It discharges of its own volition, without warning.”

His memories confirmed this; Faro watched as, in the past, Thrawn attempted to hold his own holopod, only for the metal to flash bright blue. His hands went numb, then tingled with electricity, then lit up with pain; the holopod dropped to the sheets. He tried five times before he could get his fingers to open and close properly. When he could finally pick it up again, he found the holopod dead, short-circuited.

“Ah,” said Faro. “So that’s why you wanted Ensign Gralli to hold the datapad for you.”

She eyed Thrawn’s hands, which looked harmless at the moment. There was mild discoloration over his fingertips; his nails looked bloody, the skin beneath them bruised.

“Chiss are not generally ideal conductors of electricity,” Thrawn told her, his voice mild.

Well, at least _he_ could find some humor in the situation. Faro was having a little bit of trouble with it herself. She took a moment to compose herself, clasping the datapad tightly. Letting out a slow, calming breath, she turned the datapad so Thrawn could see the Skimscrip files.

“Thank you,” he said, already studying them. “Sometimes, Commodore, a culture’s writing system evolves from its artwork. In those cases, studying the language can be as useful as studying its art.”

Faro hummed an acknowledgment. She hit the datapad’s scroll button whenever Thrawn asked her to and let her mind wander. She would need to find him new aides, regardless of what he said; the _Chimaera_ wasn’t in battle, and if need be, she could find him a dozen competent officers to help him and simply organize them into short shifts so they could complete their regular duties as well. 

If she were honest with herself, the most important part wasn’t their competence. Perhaps all _Thrawn_ wanted was someone to hold his datapad and holopod and fetch him the files he wanted — but if Faro wanted to stay sane, then it was an absolute necessity that whoever held his datapad for him also treated him with respect and discretion. Her blood was still boiling over the sullen contempt from Ensign Gralli and the unsubtle condescension from Ensign Uoric. 

“The medics won’t help you with these things?” Faro asked, glancing over at their station as she spoke. Thrawn didn’t take his eyes off the datapad.

“They have kindly offered me a selection from the ship’s audionovel catalogue to keep me entertained,” he said dryly. “And they’ve made it quite clear that I am free to ask for help in the refresher, an offer I haven’t taken advantage of thus far.”

Faro snorted. When he reached the end of the report, Thrawn sat back against the hospital bed, working through a wave of exhaustion and pain. His expression didn’t change, and his thoughts remained centered on the Skimscrip and temple through it all.

“Is Petty Officer Irick on-shift?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Faro said. “She’s on the survey team now, studying the Kinos.”

“She hasn’t submitted a report yet on the Skimscrip on the podium,” Thrawn noted, eyeing the datapad from a distance. “Though I see she has submitted a report on Skimscrip found elsewhere on the temple walls.”

“Yes, sir,” said Faro with a grimace. “The Skimscrip on the podium disappeared before Irick had the chance to photograph it.”

 _Because I put my hand on it,_ she thought with chagrin.

“That’s no matter,” said Thrawn dismissively. “You have a remarkably clear memory of that moment, Commodore.”

His hand moved, and for a heartbeat, Faro thought he was reaching for her — but in the end, he only slid his hand along the side of the bed and hit the call button. They both watched the medic station as the lights blinked and one of the nurses bustled over.

“Sir?” she said when she’d reached the foot of Thrawn’s bed.

“Petty Officer Nogoruck,” Thrawn greeted her. “Fetch me a pad of flimsi and a pencil, please.” 

She disappeared back into the medic station and returned a moment later, handing both items to Thrawn. He thanked her, but waited until she was gone before he spoke again.

“Connect to my mind as thoroughly as you can,” he told Faro, pulling the pad of flimsi into his lap. He balanced it against his bent legs and held the pencil awkwardly in his left hand, adjusting his grip on it with help from his right. After a moment, with his gaze fixed on the blank flimsi, he called to mind the memory of the mutasteel podium, focusing on the strings of Skimscrip characters etched into it.

“Let’s keep this in order,” Thrawn murmured, his eyes sliding closed. “As best we could.”

Faro nodded her understanding and closed her eyes, too, joining Thrawn to focus on the memory. Between the two of them, the podium became startlingly clear, as if it were a physical object that Faro could reach out and touch with her hands. 

Together, they examined the top-left area of the podium. The characters were so clearly visualized that Faro could have read them, if they were in Aurebesh. She opened her eyes halfway and could still see the characters in her mind; across from her, his own eyes hooded, Thrawn painstakingly drew the characters, reproducing each one on the sheet of flimsi.

“This should at least give Irick something to work with,” he said quietly, most of his brain power focused on the memory. “Since the podium itself is no longer in existence.”

Faro nodded and closed her eyes again, reveling in the clarity of Thrawn’s memory — or rather, Thrawn’s memory of _her_ memory, since he’d been unconscious in the chair at the time. She’d never been able to examine her own memories like this before; certainly, she’d noticed at times that she could recall a battlefield with more clarity than her colleagues, but it had never been quite so detailed or cinematic as this. 

Thrawn noted the characters down one by one, with diligence, and then passed them to her to double-check. There were no corrections to be made; he’d recreated the characters to perfection, matching them perfectly with Faro’s memory. He’d even drawn a handprint in the center.

“Very good, sir,” Faro said, letting the memory fade. 

“Scan it, please,” Thrawn told her, slumping back against his pillow. He lifted his hands to his chest, slowly rotating his wrists; Faro winced in sympathy, all too aware of how they ached. 

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“And send it to the linguistics team for analysis,” he added. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, and switched over to mental communication:

_I’d like to know precisely what to make of our bond._


	4. Chapter 4

“You’re supposed to be lying down, sir,” Ensign Uoric said.

“The curtain’s pulled for privacy, Ensign,” said Thrawn, his voice clipped. He pulled the covers over his lap and sat down again, raising his eyebrows until Uoric stepped away and let the curtains fall back into place.

 _Unbelievable_ , he said to Faro.

Standing on the bridge, Faro silently agreed. She’d been tuning Thrawn out up until Uoric barged in, and then the surge of exasperation from Thrawn had forced her attention back to him. She watched absently as Thrawn sat on his hospital bed, watching Uoric’s heat signature from the other side of the curtain. Only when Uoric backed away did Thrawn move again.

His hospital gown was folded neatly on the bed behind him. Imperial athletic gear — where he’d gotten it, Faro didn’t know — lay crumpled nearby, where he’d dropped it when Uoric came in.

 _Why are you getting dressed?_ Faro asked.

Thrawn froze in the process of putting his shirt on. Faro could almost physically feel his mind stretching out to reach hers, his thoughts circling around her presence in his brain, cataloguing how far her fingers reached.

He still visualized her mind as alien fingers. Faro wasn’t sure how to feel about that. 

_The medics have given me permission to wear civilian clothes,_ Thrawn said, pulling a soft, unwashed sweatshirt over his head. Faro could almost feel it brushing against her skin and knew from the sensation that it was fresh from the quartermaster, and had never been worn before. 

Faro frowned. There was something off about Thrawn, something she couldn’t quite identify. She connected to his mind more thoroughly, thinking it might be something physical, and caught a flash of indignation from Thrawn, who had just pulled the covers off his lap.

 _Sorry_ , said Faro with a grimace, pulling away a little. 

She buried herself in Thrawn’s mind while he got dressed, examining his statement once more. The medics _had_ given him permission to wear civilian clothes, she discovered — and when Thrawn had lied to them, innocently claiming he didn’t own any civvies, the nurse on-duty for night shift had left him alone for twenty minutes so she could go to the quartermaster and sequester a set of athletic gear in Thrawn’s size.

And during that time, Thrawn had located a pair of crutches and had the med-droid adjust them for his height. 

_Sir?_ asked Faro, eyes narrowed in suspicion. _What are the crutches for?_

Thrawn batted her mind away from his dismissively. He was lying flat on the bed and lifting his hips in order to pull his sweatpants on without injuring his ankles further. 

_Sir, where are you planning to go?_ Faro asked.

 _The refresher,_ said Thrawn calmly.

 _I’m connected to your mind, sir,_ said Faro incredulously. _I can tell when you’re lying._

He pulled the trouser string tight and sat up again, reaching for a small bag on the chair next to his bed. It was the type designed to carry datapads, with pouches hidden away inside for individual datacards. When Thrawn adjusted the strap over his shoulder, Faro could tell from the weight of the bag that it wasn’t empty.

 _Thrawn?_ she prompted.

He pulled the curtain back, checking for Ensign Uoric, who was currently at the medic station with his back turned to Thrawn. Flirting with one of the nurses, Thrawn suspected.

The fact that Thrawn could tell when humans were flirting with each other unsettled Faro deeply. She watched as Thrawn, keeping one eye on Uoric, reached for his newly-acquired crutches.

 _It seems an awful lot like you’re sneaking out of sick bay, sir,_ Faro said. She dug out her comlink, put her thumb over the call button, and sent Thrawn a quick, stark warning image of what she was doing. 

_So call them,_ said Thrawn with a surge of irritation. _You know, Commodore, this really isn't the best use of our newfound abilities. You could easily be using my cognitive power to enhance your own decision-making, instead of using it to spy on me in the fresher._

Before Faro could unpack all of that and formulate a response, Thrawn leaned on the crutches and slammed his right foot against the floor. Pain stabbed right through him and into Faro, making her knees buckle and her eyes squeeze shut. She leaned heavily against her console and tightened her lips to hold back a groan.

Her connection to Thrawn’s mind was lost, replaced with white-hot agony. For several seconds, she could scarcely even see. 

When the pain faded enough for her to search for Thrawn’s mind again, she found a wall of Cheunh waiting for her, and that with the combination of the pain from Thrawn’s ankle made it impossible for her to glean anything off him.

 _Bastard_ , she thought, aiming the word right at him. _What if I'd been doing something important?_

He didn't bother to respond. Hissing through her teeth, Faro pulled away from his mind as much as she could.

She shook her head and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. Most of the bridge crew were still sitting with eyes forward, focused on their consoles. But Hammerly, who stood on the command walkway, was staring back at Faro with an expression of concern on her face.

Faro grimaced at her and hoped that from this far away, it looked like a smile. She waited for Hammerly to break eye contact; it took a harrowing amount of time.

And just as Hammerly finally looked away, Faro’s comlink beeped.

“Damn it,” she muttered. She thumbed it on. “Commodore Faro.”

The answer was exactly what she expected it to be.

_“Commodore, this is Commander Nerric from sick bay. Ah, just comming to inform you that the … Grand Admiral has…”_

Faro let her eyes slide closed. She could feel occasional sharp stabs of pain coming from the area of her brain that dealt with Thrawn’s consciousness. When she got closer, she could just barely make out that he was limping along using only his left foot and the crutches, but she couldn’t tell where he was going or if anyone was with him.

 _You know you're causing_ me _pain, too, sir,_ she thought at him. To Commander Nerric, she said, “Is Ensign Uoric there?” 

“ _Ah, yes,_ ” said Commander Nerric, with only a hint of embarrassment. “ _Yes, he … he isn’t sure where precisely the Grand Admiral’s got off to._ ”

“And is the Grand Admiral not allowed to visit his own quarters?” asked Faro, making her voice as brusque and haughty as she could.

Thrawn owed her one, she decided. And they would _definitely_ be having a talk about this new mental-block method he'd discovered. 

“... _Well_ ,” said Nerric cautiously. “ _We’d really like to keep him for observation, ma’am._ ”

Faro greeted this statement with frosty silence.

“ _But of course, he’s authorized to — to make his own decisions in that regard,_ ” Nerric hastened to add. “ _He’s in his quarters, then?_ ”

Faro checked on Thrawn viciously and got a headache-inducing vision of him walking down some deserted passageway. _Where are you going?_ she demanded.

Predictably, she got no answer.

“Yes, he is,” Faro said to Nerric. “I’ll be sure to escort him back to the sick bay when he’s done. Thank you, Commander.”

Nerric sounded like he might protest, so she cut the comm short as quickly as she could.

She tapped her fingers against the console and bit her lip in the resulting silence, casting her eyes about the bridge. The sensor crew was busy scanning the planet below them, continuing the mapping work that Thrawn had set in motion before he was injured. The survey team was stationed in a well-equipped tech shuttle in the planet’s orbit, poring through data from the Kinos and rerouting all information to Faro’s personal server, as well as Thrawn’s.

She thought over the evidence. First and foremost, she trusted Thrawn not to do anything stupid (foot-stomping and ankle-wound-exacerbation aside), and she already knew his list of grievances with Uroci and Gralli. Most likely, he was seeking out some place quiet and secluded where he could complete his work — particularly his extremely neglected top secret messages from the Core — without interruption.

His wrists would be a hindrance, certainly, but clearly Thrawn had already weighed that risk and decided he could push through it. Most likely, he actually _was_ sequestered in his quarters, or in one of his offices.

Though Faro supposed that if he wanted to avoid _her_ as well as the ensigns and medical staff, then he’d probably found somewhere else to work.

She grimaced again. Privacy was important to Thrawn — she’d known that even before their minds were connected, and she was painfully aware of it now. Both literally and figuratively. She could sense the reflexive disgruntlement that went through him every time she encroached on his thoughts. So her options now were to either force her way through the barricade of pain and Cheunh he’d constructed to figure out where he was and why he was so desperate to keep the information from her … or trust that he could look after himself and let him be.

With a sigh, she pushed away from her console and made her way up the command walkway to Hammerly.

“How’s the survey team doing?” she asked, pushing all thoughts of Thrawn out of her mind. 

Hammerly gave her an unsubtle once-over before answering. “Not great, ma’am,” she said. She passed her Kino remote over to Faro; it was connected to the Kino designated “Bridge Feed,” which did nothing but follow other Kinos around so the officer on duty could get a picture of what was going on planet-side.

Faro watched as the Kinos hovered closer and closer to the temple. It was impossible to tell where the throne room had once been; the entire structure of the temple had changed thousands of times since. But even if the throne room had been still intact, it didn’t seem to matter. The Kinos wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to study it; the mutasteel blocked them at every turn. 

“That’s … not ideal,” Faro muttered, studying the screen with a frown. 

“The survey team’s working with it as best they can,” said Hammerly. “Drodson asked me to thank you for the information you sent him yesterday, by the way.”

Faro nodded. In the back of her mind, she could feel the wall of pain and Cheunh subside a little as Thrawn became distracted. She could feel the hum of energy all around him and solid durasteel behind his back.

 _—to return your call so late, Governor,_ he was saying. _Please excuse the noise level._

Well, at least she knew he was okay. She drew away again; his thoughts were spooling out so rapidly that it gave her a headache trying to follow them. 

“I’ll have to talk to Drodson,” she murmured to Hammerly, keeping her eyes on the Kino remote. “The Grand Admiral and I are both very interested in the linguistic analysis results.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Hammerly dryly. When Faro gave her a sharp look, Hammerly steadfastly looked away.

“What have you heard?” Faro asked, unwilling to let the subject go so easily. Hammerly hunched her shoulders, giving Faro a quick, guilty look.

“Just gossip, ma’am. Forget I said anything.”

“Gossip about the temple?” asked Faro. She took a step closer to Hammerly and held the Kino out between them. Hammerly caught on to what she was doing and bent her head over the screen, so that it looked like they were having a friendly discussion over what they saw. 

“It all stems from the temple, yes,” Hammerly acknowledged, her voice low. “Nobody in bridge crew really knows what happened.”

“You’ve read the reports, haven’t you?” asked Faro.

“Of course, ma’am,” said Hammerly. She kept her eyes on the screen and her face professionally disinterested, and Faro did the same, hyper-cognizant of the crew members watching them from behind. “But it’s all a bit hard to suss out. Some of the stormtroopers reported that they saw mutasteel in the Grand Admiral’s _gums_ , but the official report says it only barely broke the skin at his temples, so…”

Faro’s face spasmed. “He was electrocuted,” she said, keeping her voice even. “And he was behind an energy shield at the time. It would have been difficult for anyone to tell exactly what was going on, but the medical evidence is clear.”

Hammerly frowned; Faro could tell she wasn’t convinced. But what did she expect Faro to tell her? That she, too, had worried for a moment that the mutasteel was snaking its way through Thrawn’s organs and veins, destroying everything it touched? Clearly it hadn’t, so what was the issue?

Unless it had, Faro thought with a chill. Unless it _had_ gone through his entire body, and then somehow emerged again without leaving a trace.

But that wasn’t possible, she told herself firmly. She checked on Thrawn again, found him in full conversation with a fellow Grand Admiral, his video feed turned off. 

She was still thinking it through when the officer at the communications station called for her.

“Commodore?” he said. 

Faro turned toward him, absently handing the Kino remote to Hammerly as she did so. 

“We’ve just received a distress signal,” the lieutenant said. “There’s a shipping freighter that’s only just left orbit from the moon Resqa III, just point-seven-seven parsecs away. They’ve been attacked by a single pirate ship, a Ghtroc Class 720 freighter with custom turbolasers mounted underneath. Requesting assistance.”

Faro glanced out the viewport, toward the unnamed planet beneath them. “Set a vector, Lieutenant,” she said with a sigh. She lifted her comlink to her lips at the same time and keyed it to Lt. Drodson’s call sign. “Drodson, this is Commodore Faro,” she said. “The Chimaera is taking a short trip to intervene in pirate activity point-seven-seven parsecs from here. The survey squadron will remain in orbit with you.”

“ _Understood, ma’am,_ ” said Drodson at once.

The Chimaera was already pulling away from the planet, yawing port with a few sharp bursts from its thrusters. Faro sat through the micro-jump calculations patiently, checked them over, and gave her approval.

When the deck shifted beneath her feet, she felt a sharp burst of emotion from Thrawn — curiosity, mostly — and as the starlines flashed and faded, Faro reached out to tell him what was going on.

 _Just some pirate activity off Resqa III,_ she said.

It was like talking into a void. Outside the viewport, the starlines had already faded entirely away, giving Faro a good view of the shipping freighter and the pathetic-looking pirate ship attacking it. She reached out to Thrawn again, searching for his mind, and found nothing.

“Hammerly?” she said.

Hammerly looked up at her. “Orders, ma’am?”

Faro felt like her head was swimming. This wasn’t the same as when she blocked Thrawn — when she did that, she could still feel the vague churn of his thoughts, and if something jarred him, she always got a sense of what it was. Nor was this like the times he’d attempted to block her; even earlier today, she’d still had a sense of where he was and what he was doing, even with the waves of pain and walls of Cheunh getting in her way.

This was different. Even when he was unconscious, she’d gotten glimpses of what he felt and dreamed of; this was like Thrawn wasn’t there at all. She stretched out to him and saw nothing but blankness. The only mind she was connected to was her own.

Mouth dry, Faro looked at Hammerly and said, “Do you think you can handle this on your own?”

Hammerly looked almost affronted, and Faro couldn’t blame her. An Imperial Star Destroyer against a single pirate ship? Ensign _Gralli_ could probably handle that on his own.

“You have the bridge, then,” Faro said, already turning away.

She heard Hammerly bark out routine orders, but her heart was pounding so hard and fast that Faro couldn’t make out the words. By the time she got to the bridge hatchway, it was all she could do not to break out into a run.

She had to find Thrawn.


	5. Chapter 5

On the bridge, Hammerly politely hailed the pirate ship and asked them to cease and desist — a request generally obeyed when it came from an ISD. Farther down in the ship, several levels beneath the bridge, Faro entered yet another corridor and squinted down it, eyeing the technicians and petty officers walking along the deck.

Her general communique to the ship’s department heads had turned up practically nothing. She’d hoped that Thrawn had shown up to commandeer someone’s work station after his escape from medbay, but her subtle inquiries as to his whereabouts had been unfruitful. There was only one decent lead — one department head told her a trooper in his division had seen the Grand Admiral in the area of Sector DEX-8.

This was DEX-8. There was no sign of Thrawn. Another quick message to the department head told Faro that the trooper wasn’t sure which way he’d seen Thrawn heading, forward or aft.

Faro took a deep breath and grabbed the first technician who passed her, trying not to look as urgent as she fell. 

“Have you seen the Grand Admiral?” she asked calmly.

From the exaggerated widening of the technician’s eyes, she guessed maybe she didn’t exactly nail the ‘calm’ part. 

“Grand Admiral _Thrawn_ , ma’am?” he asked, as if there were any other Grand Admiral on this ship.

“Yes—” She glanced quickly at his badge, making a mental note to check his latest performance review. “Yes, Technician Rettorik. Grand Admiral Thrawn. Have you seen him recently?”

She was practically vibrating with adrenaline, and when the technician didn’t answer right away, she almost let go of his arm and brushed past him in impatience. She was still working through the urge to do so when the technician half-turned and pointed down the passageway behind him.

“He came through not too long ago on crutches,” Rettorik said. Faro froze, trying not to show the surge of hope she felt at those words. “I almost said ‘attention on deck,’” Rettorik continued, “but he held his finger to his lips, so I kept quiet.”

Well, that was cute, but entirely unnecessary information. At least it helped her keep her surge of hope under control. Faro grit her teeth through a quick thank you and hurried past the technician as fast as she could. She checked the empty chambers at the end of the hall and found no sign of Thrawn inside.

The only place left for him to go was the power core. Faro frowned at the hatchway, trying to convince herself that Thrawn had no reason to go there — but it matched up _infuriatingly_ well with what little she’d been able to glean from his mind before everything suddenly went dark. He’d been sitting against durasteel, which could have been anywhere in the ship, but the hum of electricity in the air, and the sensation of heat — that could only come from close proximity to a shield, and he was most likely to find that either in the hangar bay or…

She hit the door release and stepped inside. It took her a moment of glancing around to find what she was looking for.

Slumped against the wall, unconscious but alive, was Thrawn, no more than a meter away from the power cell and its shield. 

Faro bit out a curse, hurrying over to him and dropping to her knees. He was more or less upright against the wall, with his head lolling against his shoulder and his datapad still in his lap. Faro commed the medical team first — Thrawn’s desire for secrecy and lies meant nothing in the face of serious injury — and then reached for the datapad, her jaw tight with frustration and concern **.** When Faro set it aside, she saw that it was completely dead — the battery killed in a power surge.

A horrible suspicion ate at her. She closed her fingers gently around Thrawn’s forearm and lifted his hand so she could see it. 

The skin on his fingertips was split and bleeding, his nails cracked. 

Faro clenched her jaw. She rested Thrawn’s hand on his leg, palm up so as not to hurt him, and then pressed her palms against his cheeks, gingerly straightening his head. 

_Thrawn_ , she said, trying desperately to reach him. There was nothing; not even a spark of consciousness. She could tell he was breathing, but his skin was cold, and it was difficult to swallow back a reflexive surge of fear. 

“Sir,” she said aloud. “Can you hear me?”

She brushed her thumbs against his temples, careful not to irritate the broken skin. Thrawn didn’t respond, and in the end, all her gentleness was worthless — it didn’t harm _him_ , but Faro couldn’t say the same for herself. After only a moment of examining his temples, she drew back with a gasp, pulling her hand away from Thrawn’s head as if she’d been stung.

Her fingertips were buzzing with a sensation she couldn’t quite identify — a _sharp_ feeling, maybe numbness, maybe pain — and when she yanked her hand back, she saw sparks of electricity dancing over his broken skin. She took a breath, held it. Braced herself. 

_Chiss don’t make ideal conductors of electricity,_ he’d said. He’d only been joking, but he wasn’t wrong. So what _was_ conducting the electricity? She thought of Hammerly, the concerns she’d aired on the bridge.

_Some of the stormtroopers reported that they saw mutasteel in the Grand Admiral’s gums._

Leaning forward, Faro put her thumb on Thrawn’s bottom lip and eased his mouth open, checking his teeth. His gums looked irritated, and there was dried blood in the cracks between his teeth, but she couldn’t find any broken areas of tissue where the mutasteel might have stabbed through. Maybe, she told herself, it was an effect of the electric charge that kept going through his body. But this explanation didn’t sit right with her.

She closed Thrawn’s mouth and hesitated, thinking hard. Gingerly, she placed one finger on either side of the wound at Thrawn’s temple and pulled the skin apart. She studied the wound for a moment — the raw-looking soft tissue exposed to the air — then sat back with a sigh of relief. There was no mutasteel visible beneath his skin.

Why had he chosen the power core? she wondered. It wasn’t a reliably isolated location. People came and went — technicians, engineers, officers and enlisted men. Dozens of people must have come upon Thrawn in his study nook — and he would have known this before coming here, so he must have had some other motivator besides solitude and quiet.

She glanced at the power cell, at the humming wall of energy around it. Her gut twisted; she thought of the temple and its throne.

She grabbed Thrawn’s hands again.

“Sir,” she said, her voice measured and calm. “This is Commodore Karyn Faro. Do you read me?”

There was no answer — Thrawn’s face didn’t twitch at the sound of her voice, and mentally, his consciousness didn’t even flicker in response. It remained dormant, unreachable. Faro inched closer, tightening her grip on Thrawn’s hands, running her thumbs in circles over his knuckles.

“Sir,” she tried again, using the same brisk voice she used on the comm. “This is Commodore Karyn Faro. I am attempting to reach Grand Admiral Thrawn. Do you read me?”

This time, deep in the black void that was Thrawn’s mind, she felt something stirring. She caught a flash of sensation — something utterly alien to her, something without thought or emotion which made her think, however inexplicably, of a transistor amplifying an electric current.

Like Thrawn was the transistor.

Like something _else_ was moving through him, coming closer and closer to Faro’s mind.

 _Input/output,_ she thought, and then she ground her teeth and dug her fingernails into the broken skin on Thrawn’s hands.

“Sir,” she said forcefully, “this is Commodore Karyn Faro. The ISD Chimaera is moving in response to a distress signal from a shipping freighter under attack by pirates. How do you recommend we proceed?”

She watched Thrawn’s eyes closely, waiting for any sign that they were flickering beneath his lids. She thought over what to say next quickly and carefully: on the bridge, most likely, Hammerly was ‘negotiating’ with the pirate captain, who would attempt to spin his or her actions in a more Imperial-approved light. The innocent supply freighter would be re-cast as a Rebel sympathizer, and the pirates themselves would claim to be innocent do-gooders who just didn’t want to see the Imperials ripped off. 

It would take Hammerly a while to sit through that spiel, and a few minutes more to either take the pirates in or, if she deemed them inconsequential enough (not likely), let them go. In the meantime, it was possible the pirates would attempt to run (likely) or continue their attack on the freighter (not likely). In any case, it was a routine procedure, something Thrawn himself would certainly trust to the bridge crew’s judgment.

So if Faro wanted to call him back, she had to call upon Thrawn’s sense of responsibility, and that meant she had to do a little re-casting of events herself.

“Sir,” she said, digging her nails into the wounds on Thrawn’s fingertips, “the pirate ship has broken free of our tractor beam with a bi-thruster spin. Reinforcements have arrived from seven separate vectors; the flagship has attacked the freighter once again. What do you recommend?”

Thrawn’s mind stirred again, this time ebbing closer and closer to Faro’s. She watched electricity flicker at his temples and crawl down his skin, raising the hair on his arms. As it reached his wrists, she drew her hands away and watched blue sparks tangle with each other over the broken skin on Thrawn’s fingertips.

“Sir,” she said, keeping her hands well aloft from Thrawn’s. Her voice was shaking. “The pirate ship has engaged its turbolasers against us. Shields are down three percent. What do you recommend?”

The electricity at his fingertips had only just died when another train of sparks started at his temples. It trailed over his closed eyelids, turning them translucent, giving Faro a brief, unsettling glimpse of the glazed red eyes beneath.

“Sir?” she said, taking a shallow breath. Her chest was tight.

She watched the electricity crawl down — over the bridge of his nose, over his lips, the column of his throat. It gathered energy as it traveled; the sparks grew brighter, lasted longer. The humming, sizzling sound of electricity was so loud it almost matched the roar of the shield behind her.

“Sir?” said Faro again, edging backward, away from Thrawn.

The electricity reached his fingertips again. Faro took a deep breath, slowly getting to her feet. She balled her hands into fists.

“Sir,” she said, in one last, desperate try, “what do you recommend?”

She watched electricity consume Thrawn’s body entirely, making his skin glow.

 _Disable the pirate ship, of course,_ came Thrawn’s voice, faint and dim.

And with a brilliant surge of light and energy, the power cell behind Faro spun up — a sure sign that someone on the bridge had keyed the ion cannons to fire.

The electricity around Thrawn was too bright to look at. It spun up along with the power cell, brighter and brighter — louder than Faro could stand —

And then everything went dark. 


	6. Chapter 6

Hammerly glared down at her console, her mouth tight. The bridge was deathly silent; for a long moment, she couldn’t even hear the tapping of fingers against keys, a sound that was almost _always_ audible on the bridge.

She took a deep breath and raised her head. Around the crew pits, officers were studiously avoiding her eyes. 

“Who fired the ion cannon?” asked Hammerly, her voice low and cold.

There was no response. Outside the viewport, Hammerly could see the pirate ship floating dead in space, its systems disabled. A warm anger unfurled in her stomach as she stared at it; she’d been in the middle of negotiations with the idiot on the other line when the ion cannon had discharged. The pirate captain had been remarkably loose-lipped, with no sense of operational security; in a few short minutes, he’d let slip information about his allies, his routes, his targets — and whether he’d done so accidentally or deliberately, it was information Hammerly had been eager to learn more about.

But then someone onboard the Chimaera had fired on him, and now the pirate’s comm — and everything else on his ship — was down.

And he most certainly would not be talking to her so freely again when his systems came back online.

Hammerly stood, planting her hands flat on her console. “Who fired the ion cannon?” she demanded again, her eyes sweeping over the weapons stations. 

The officers there stiffened and looked away.

“Okay,” said Hammerly, forcing herself to sound calm. “Let me ask a different question, then. Who _deliberately_ altered the ion cannon and removed the safety precautions?”

She was potently aware of Pyrondi, who was trying to casually sidle up to Hammerly’s side. 

“Commander,” said Pyrondi under her breath. Her nervousness was clear.

“You?” asked Hammerly, raising her eyebrows.

Pyrondi hesitated. She grabbed Hammerly’s sleeve and tried to lead her away. But Hammerly wouldn’t be budged; for the first time in years of working together with Pyrondi, Hammerly refused to ignore the difference in their ranks. She drew herself up to her full height, looking pointedly at the lieutenant rank plaque on Pyrondi’s chest. With a grimace, Pyrondi let go of Hammerly’s sleeve and moved away, ducking her head.

“Ma’am,” she said carefully, “I don’t think anyone in the bridge crew could have removed the safety parameters fast enough to fire the cannon.”

Hammerly stared at her, eyes narrow and cold. She didn’t say anything, forcing Pyrondi to go on in order to fill the silence.

“Nobody in Weapons even had their hands on their consoles,” said Pyrondi urgently, searching Hammerly’s face. “I was watching them. We had all systems keyed up and ready to go _just in case_ , but we weren’t waiting to fire. To disable the security precautions would take either several minutes of coding or—”

She gestured wordlessly.

“Or what?” said Hammerly.

Pyrondi hesitated. She studied Hammerly’s face, her lips parted as she thought over what she wanted to say. “Well, it’s … purely hypothetical, ma’am,” she said haltingly. “So I’m not sure _what_ happened.”

Hammerly glanced at the weapons station. The second weapons officer, a young lieutenant, was red-faced and looked almost in tears; he watched Hammerly and Pyrondi’s conversation furtively, and after a moment, Hammerly remembered that he’d just transferred from a cruiser in Vader’s fleet. He was waiting for her to blow up, she realized — just like she’d once waited with bated breath for _Thrawn_ to blow up every time something went wrong. It had taken her months to realize he simply didn’t treat his subordinates that way.

This lieutenant hadn’t learned that yet.

She took a deep breath.

“What’s the hypothetical?” Hammerly asked.

Pyrondi’s eyebrows furrowed. She avoided Hammerly’s eyes.

“If someone was connected to the central database,” she said. “Or directly to the power core…”

She trailed off, shaking her head almost apologetically; clearly, she’d already dismissed this option as too far-fetched **.** Hammerly turned away from her, staring out the viewport at the disabled pirate ship. She’d seen the general comm that went out minutes before the ion cannon discharged; it had been sent by Commodore Faro, and all it said was _‘Medical team, report to power core at once. Medpack, stretcher. ASAP.’_ Why was Faro in the power core? Why had she left the bridge so quickly in the first place?

With a sigh, Hammerly turned to the communications station.

“Keep trying to reach them,” she said grimly, pointing out the viewport at the pirate ship. “Let me know when they come back online.”

* * *

The lights hadn’t come back on inside the power core yet, and Faro was still adjusting to the change when the hatchway opened and a team of technicians poured in. They didn’t glance her way, each of them hurrying to a different power station along the bulkhead, but Faro stiffened by reflex and shifted closer to Thrawn, trying to shield his unconscious body from view.

She watched them go, single-mindedly focused on their work. It was only a matter of time before one of them glanced her way; realizing this, Faro forced her face into a stern mask and stood, slowly and shakily. She planted her feet, working some confidence into her posture, and stood next to Thrawn’s body as if both of them belonged there.

A technician came her way only moments later, his eyes scanning the walls for a power station. Only when he was almost upon them did he glance over and see Faro. She watched as he jumped and his face froze, his eyes darting down to her rank plaque.

“Attention—” he started, his voice too tremulous to actually call anyone to attention.

“At ease,” said Faro quickly. “Carry on, Technician.”

His eyes darted down to Thrawn. She watched his eyebrows knit together in concern.

“ _Carry on_ ,” Faro repeated, putting some iron into her voice. “The medics are on their way.”

His head bobbed and he hurried past her, skirting around Thrawn to reach the power station. Faro glanced down at Thrawn; her fingers tightened on her arms. 

He was breathing, she told herself. His pulse was strong. He was fine.

He didn’t _look_ fine.

The electricity had almost entirely disappeared, but a few stray sparks still traveled over his skin now and then — and each time Faro saw one, it put a hollow pit in her stomach. She checked her comm, confirming to herself for the third time that the medical team had seen her message; the timestamp of their response read twelve minutes ago, meaning that any moment now—

The hatchway hissed open again. This time, nearly all the technicians looked around; a ripple of surprise went through them as the medical team swarmed in, and only then did most of them look around and notice Thrawn lying unconscious on the floor. There was a flurry of uncertain movement; should they stick to their work or should they help? Some of them took their hands off their power stations and half-turned, taking tentative steps toward Thrawn.

“Techs, I want this power cell up and running _now_ ,” Faro barked, raising her voice to be heard over the hum of the energy shield. With a guilty jolt, the technicians went back to work just as the medical team surrounded Thrawn, checking his vitals the same way Faro already had. 

She gritted her teeth, stepping back so the medics had room to move him. As they laid him out on the stretcher, Faro reached out tentatively, connecting her mind with his.

 _You’re alright now,_ she told him.

What greeted her was a wall of alien text, completely devoid of imagery but rigidly structured — and completely unlike the expansive multimedia map that Thrawn’s mind normally resembled. Faro let her mind dance around it, feeling it out, trying to find anything inside that text that felt familiar.

She heard a voice in her head, strangely accented:

_Faro?_

Something inside her chest loosened. She didn’t recognize the accent, but the voice? That was Thrawn; undeniably, it was Thrawn.

 _I’m here,_ she said, and felt something in the alien structure of his mind relax; it was similar to the sensation of falling asleep after a long day. He didn’t speak to her again after that, but he didn’t need to.

She followed the stretcher all the way to sick bay, feeling light and shaky all at once. 

* * *

Forty-five minutes later, the pirate ship was in the hangar bay, the pirates were in the brig, and Faro was sitting next to Thrawn’s hospital bed watching his eyelids flutter as he finally came awake. Faro shook herself, checking Thrawn’s mind again, and to her relief, it was a little bit more familiar now — she could sense the same things he was sensing, like the smell of antiseptic and the pain in his fingertips, but she couldn’t hear his thought process like she could the last time he came awake.

She reached out to him mentally.

_Sir?_

Groggily, he turned his head and met her eyes. 

“Sir,” said Faro, relief surging through her. She glanced over at the nurses’ station and stood quickly, pulling Thrawn’s curtain shut while they weren’t looking. “We need to talk,” she said.

His eyes were hooded and fixed on her lips. She couldn’t read his face.

“Sir?” Faro prompted. 

“ _Bo sonsaj biani,_ ” Thrawn said.

Faro paused with her mouth open, her response dying on her lips. For a split second, she’d thought Thrawn was speaking Basic, that his words were simply too slurred for her to understand. But she realized almost instantly that this assumption was false. Thrawn was speaking clearly and crisply, every syllable carefully enunciated, and his eyes were as sharp as ever. He wasn’t slurring. He was speaking a different language.

“Thrawn,” said Faro carefully, studying his face, “do you understand me?”

“ _Medeijen kherig bi khiedeg,_ ” Thrawn said.

“Yes or no,” Faro told him. She pointed to herself as she nodded and then shook her head. “Do you understand me?”

Watching her gravely, Thrawn nodded. “ _Gekhdea ta namiog iolgaj chadakuhgia bianu ue?_ ” he said.

“I can’t understand you, sir,” said Faro flatly. “I have no idea what language you’re speaking, but it’s not Basic.”

“ _Endsun Bish,_ ” Thrawn said, his voice level and calm. Then, carefully mimicking her words, “Not Basic?”

“No,” said Faro. His accent was wrong, she noticed. It wasn’t his typical cultured, quasi-Coruscanti accent, but it wasn’t the thick, hard-edged Unknown Regions accent that Faro had heard from time to time at the end of a long day or — once or twice — in the middle of a firefight, when Thrawn was too busy guiding his men to modulate his voice.

She watched him closely, searching his face for any sign of what he was thinking. His mind was, in a certain capacity, unreadable to her. His thoughts had been in Basic just earlier today; now they were in the same unknown language he was speaking aloud. But the rest of his brain — the nebulous images and splashes of color that made up his thoughts — was still accessible.

And that included emotions.

And right now, though he was looking at her calmly and without expression, Thrawn was filled with an intense surge of emotion that Faro could only identify as distress so strong it made her own chest tight and elevated her heart rate along with his. 

“So you can understand Basic, but not speak it,” Faro said. The words came out automatically, without much thought behind them; she was speaking aloud mostly to distract Thrawn while she invaded his mind, trying to dismantle the feeling of distress before it turned into panic. Thrawn didn’t answer her; she could feel a cold flush taking over his body, and knew that he wanted to speak, but couldn’t force himself to open his mouth when he knew what would come out. 

“Are you trying to speak it?” Faro asked him, her voice neutral. Thrawn’s lips twitched, but he didn’t answer aloud. He only nodded. “Okay,” said Faro. “Well, let’s try writing.”

She stood, sending him a quick, _I’ll be right back._ Stepping around the curtain, Faro approached a nearby warm-storage cupboard first; she was aware of the medics watching her, so she kept her face expressionless and her posture self-assured as she opened the cupboard. It was filled with folded blankets kept heated for patients, and she removed one, folding it over her arm.

She walked to the nurses’ station next, collecting a pad of flimsi and a pencil without offering an explanation. The nurses didn’t ask.

Behind her, she could feel Thrawn’s mind reaching out toward her — involuntarily, since she knew Thrawn couldn’t control his side of things. In her absence, his sense of mixed frustration and embarrassment was ratcheting up again, his thoughts swirling faster and becoming more difficult to read.

 _Coming back,_ Faro told him. 

She picked up her pace as much as she could without drawing questions from the medics. Thrawn’s sense of emotion didn’t flicker at her voice, but when she pulled the curtain back and stepped inside again, she felt his mind surging toward her even as he sat there, looking more or less fine.

Faro set the pad of flimsi and the pencil down on his mattress, near his feet, and unfolded the warm blanket. She ignored the flicker of annoyance from Thrawn as he noticed the faint hint of steam coming off the fabric and realized she’d read his mind to figure out he was cold. He held still, not bothering to keep his irritation off his face as she wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.

 _Better?_ Faro asked. 

His thoughts swirled around hers, doing nothing tangible to her — but Faro could tell he was trying to push her out, so she pulled away a little, lingering on the borders of Thrawn’s mind. Almost immediately, he seemed more exhausted — and less in control of his emotions — than he had been a moment ago. 

“Do you want to try writing in Aurebesh?” Faro asked.

Thrawn frowned, looking very much like he _didn’t_ want to, but he nodded and gestured for the writing pad. Faro picked it up and then hesitated, looking at his bandaged fingers.

“ _Bi bichag chagni_ ,” Thrawn said with a trace of impatience. He curled his fingers toward his palms in a gesture that screamed ‘just give me the pad.’ Carefully, Faro rested the pad of flimsi in his right hand and, remembering his preference from earlier, placed the pencil in his left.

Thrawn let the flimsi slide into his lap almost immediately. With his right hand, he studiously manipulated the bandaged fingers on his left until he had the pencil propped at a not-too-awkward angle between them. Distantly, Faro felt a muted frustration from him as he held the tip of the pencil to the paper; he couldn’t hold it tightly enough to write the same way an adult normally would, so he was forced to trail the pencil lightly over the paper like a small child.

Patiently, Thrawn worked his way through a clumsily-shaped series of letters and then sat back, examining what he’d written. Faro felt a flicker of hesitant approval from his mind.

“Can I see?” she asked.

He nodded, making a strange gesture where he touched the heels of both palms to the edges of the pad — indicating that he couldn’t pick it up to hand it to her. Faro leaned forward and removed it from his lap, her fingers brushing against his thigh.

She studied what he’d written. It wasn’t Aurebesh — but it was _intensely_ familiar.

“What did you write?” asked Faro.

Thrawn’s red eyes scanned over her face. The map of thoughts inside his head quieted for a moment and then faded into the background as he focused on one image: an uncanny-looking image of his own face, as Faro had never seen it before — reflected back at him from a mirror. 

“Your name?” Faro asked.

Thrawn nodded.

Staring at the writing pad, Faro felt herself going numb, her hands tingling. If Thrawn had written just about anything else, she thought, she could rationalize this. If he’d written “vessel,” for example, or “anchor,” or even “chair.”

But he’d written his own name.

And he’d written it in Ancient Skimscrip, the same language that had once covered the temple walls.

How could he possibly know how to write his own name in a dead language, especially one he'd never studied? Faro stared at the letters, trying to convince herself she was imagining things. She looked up at Thrawn and found him watching her with narrowed eyes, and she knew he’d somehow read her carefully blank face and figured out her reaction.

“What language does this look like to you, sir?” she asked, her heart thumping. She turned the writing pad around for him to see. “Aurebesh?”

Studying the letters one more time, Thrawn nodded. Faro took a deep breath and handed it back to him.

“Can you write it again in your native language?” she asked. “The one you grew up speaking?”

There was a mild flare of irritation at that second sentence, as if Thrawn thought she was patronizing him, but he took the pad and lowered the pencil once more. He wrote his own name painstakingly, but a little quicker than before. This time, Faro stood next to his shoulder so she could see what he was writing.

It was exactly the same as what he’d written before.

“Do these two—” said Faro, pointing at the identical words. “—look the same to you?”

Eyebrows furrowed, Thrawn shook his head.

“So this looks like Aurebesh?” said Faro, pointing to the letters on top.

Thrawn nodded.

“And this looks like your native language?” asked Faro, indicating the bottom letters.

“Cheunh,” Thrawn told her in his strange new accent.

“Yes or no, sir,” Faro reminded him.

Shooting her an exasperated look that felt entirely undeserved, Thrawn nodded. 

“Okay,” said Faro. She hesitated, examining the writing pad a moment longer before she took it and the pencil away from him. She set them on his bedside table. “We’re going to have to call the linguistics team on this,” she said. She fingered her comlink, but something stopped her from calling them right away. 

She wanted to ask Thrawn what had happened in the power core, but she had no way to hear his answer. She wanted to ask him about the electricity — the ion cannon discharge — a million things. Tentatively, she approached his mind again, seeking answers there. His thoughts were impossible to decipher, but everything else was open to her. 

The low-level panic burning in the back of his mind.

The way he tore each foreign word apart even as he thought it, searching inside the alien tones of Ancient Skimscrip for something familiar, something organic to him.

The way the colors in his mind fogged and pulsated around Faro’s own mind wherever she happened to touch him, each shade turning ugly, corrupted, as his mood grew darker.

The temple. The mutasteel. The chair.

With an impassive expression, Thrawn leaned back against the headboard. He seemed to be bracing himself for something. He glanced Faro’s way briefly, taking in her expression as if by rote. He placed his palms flat against the bed near his hips, even though it hurt him to put even minor pressure on him.

And then, with a calmness that was completely belied by the screaming panic in his head, Thrawn lifted his foot and slammed it sideways into the bed’s plastisteel railing.

“God _damn_ it,” Faro bit out, reeling away from his mind as pain consumed him. Teeth gritted, Thrawn bent his knee in a reflexive flinch and then forced himself to straighten his leg even as it shook in protest. He lifted his foot and tried to slam his ankle into the railing again, but Faro was too quick for him; she practically dove onto the bed with him, grabbing his leg and wrestling it back down onto the mattress.

“ _Stop_ ,” she said. An echo of Thrawn’s pain settled in her right ankle, where the mutasteel had bored into his. It was faint; little more than a dull ache; and she knew it was only a fraction of what he felt. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she hissed, holding his leg down until she was certain he wouldn’t try again. 

“ _Minio tolgionoos khal biagairi,_ ” Thrawn hissed back. He jerked back against the headboard, glaring at her, when Faro tried to put her hand on his shoulder.

“Okay, fine,” said Faro, fuming as she pulled her hand back. “But for God’s sake, sir, if you do that again—”

He looked away from her, muttering something under his breath in Ancient Skimscrip.

“Just keep in mind you’re hurting me, too,” Faro said, barely keeping her anger under control. She could feel exhaustion and distress swirling in Thrawn’s mind at levels that would have sent her into a panic attack, if she was feeling it herself — and the knowledge of that was all that kept her from snapping at him. 

She snatched the writing pad off the bedside table. She couldn’t stay here and talk to the linguistics team with Thrawn’s mind so close and raw, she realized. It was bleeding into her own emotions, putting her on edge. 

She had to get some air.

“I’ll be back,” she told him shortly; he didn’t respond. On her way out, Faro made eye contact with the medics and gestured irritably toward Thrawn’s bed. She left the sick bay at a fast clip, examining the Ancient Skimscrip on the writing pad and shaking her head.

Muttering under her breath, she pulled her comlink out of her breast pocket.

“Faro to Lieutenant Drodson,” she said.

There was a pause before he answered; the shuttle’s position in orbit delayed responses over comm.

“Lieutenant Drodson,” he said finally. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Faro glanced down at the writing pad again. “You’re docking with the Chimaera in an hour,” she said, recalling his schedule. “I want the entire linguistics team to take an hour of liberty after that to rest and then meet me in the conference room. We have a few new items to discuss.”

She barely heard his response. Her thoughts were centered on Thrawn — on the dead language he couldn’t help but think and speak in — on the temple and its so-called throne. She remembered how the mutasteel had pushed its way into his body.

And that scene in the power core, with electricity trailing over his skin.

And the ion cannon discharge, mere moments after she’d asked Thrawn what he would do if a pirate ship attacked and he’d responded, cool and calm as ever: _Disable the pirate ship, of course._

So many unanswered questions — and at least for now, no way to wrestle those answers out of Thrawn. Assuming he even knew.

Faro’s comlink beeped again. With a sigh, she stopped midstride and pulled it out of her pocket, thumbing it on without glancing at the caller ID. Drodson again, she assumed.

“Commodore Faro,” she said.

The voice that answered sent a chill down her spine. Deep, mechanical, and horribly familiar, it greeted her, the comlink turning the sound of a respirator into static.

“Commodore,” said Darth Vader. “I have sensed a great disturbance in the Force.”


	7. Chapter 7

The nurse they’d saddled him with was named Petty Officer Yon-Durok, and Thrawn suspected she hadn’t yet turned twenty. This was her first command since she finished training, and she looked very much like she’d rather be anywhere than here in sick bay, treating her commanding officer’s wounds. She still wore her hair in a tight bun and kept her tunic sleeves rolled tightly — signs of someone who hadn’t quite overcome the nervousness of training.

“You’re doing well,” Thrawn told her, his voice soft and patient as she re-bandaged his left hand.

Yon-Durok looked up at him, her eyebrows furrowed and her lips a thin line. “Sorry, sir?” she said.

Carefully, Thrawn repeated himself, making sure to enunciate the words. “You’re doing well, Petty Officer. You’re well-suited to nursing.”

Her nose twitched and she looked away, not responding. “Uh, I’m going to take the bandages off your right hand now, sir,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

“That’s fine,” said Thrawn. He held his right hand out to her palm up, and Yon-Durok shot him a surprised look before tentatively picking at the bandages. Bacta wouldn’t work on his wrist wounds, so she didn’t bother with them, only checked to make sure they weren’t infected. Then, with a quiet shake of her head, Yon-Durok shifted her attention to the most recent injuries — the series of burns and split skin at his fingertips.

She cleaned his hand gently, removing the layer of bacta gel a different medic had applied when Thrawn was unconscious. He watched, head tilted to the side, as she spread a fresh layer over his bruised skin. Her fingers brushed over his exposed nail beds so lightly that he barely felt them.

He wished she’d dig her nails in. But she was gentle to a fault. Even as she dug a sliver of a broken, bloodied fingernail out of his skin — the other medic must have missed it — she was gentle. 

Gentleness, Thrawn thought, did nothing to dispel the fog in his head. He wished Faro were here, but he suspected he’d made a major misstep earlier, driving her away like that. It had seemed necessary at the time to get her out of his head; now, with pain flaring up in his right leg and Faro nowhere to be seen, he wasn’t so sure.

“Thank you, Petty Officer,” he said as Yon-Durok bandaged his right hand again.

She gave him an odd look, not responding. When the bandages were secure, she patted his hand and guided it back down to the mattress, then swiveled her chair down to the foot of his bed. She remembered to warn him only after she’d already grabbed the edge of his blanket.

“I’m going to check your feet next, sir,” she said, glancing up at him.

He nodded. Yon-Durok hesitated, her lips parting as she stared at him. She glanced back at the nurses’ station, perhaps looking for guidance, perhaps for support. She looked back at him again, studying him closer.

Quietly, leaning forward, she whispered, “Can you understand me, sir?”

Thrawn’s mouth went dry. He tried to keep his face expressionless as he met her eyes.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice steady.

Yon-Durok frowned at him, her head cocked to the side. After a long moment, she glanced back at the nurses’ station again. “I’ve got an idea, sir,” she said, as if Thrawn hadn’t spoken. “If you can understand me, nod your head like this.”

She nodded her head up and down in an exaggerated gesture, but Thrawn couldn’t bring himself to answer. His face felt flushed; his heart was pounding in his chest. He looked away from Yon-Durok, unable to meet her eyes, and pretended not to understand. 

“Oh,” he heard her say, her voice small. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to…”

He kept his head turned to the side, refusing to look at her. As such, he didn’t see her leaning closer until he felt her hand tentatively touch his.

“Don’t cry,” she said quietly.

Thrawn sucked in a sharp breath, snatching his hand away. “I’m not crying,” he said, exasperated by the suggestion — but his words came out rough and foreign, and he could tell she didn’t understand. His heart was still beating too quickly for comfort, and he could feel his palms sweating beneath the freshly-applied bandages.

“Okay,” said Petty Officer Yon-Durok, reacting more to his tone than to his words as she retreated to the foot of the bed. She glanced at him hesitantly, then grabbed the edge of his blanket again and started to lift it. “I’m just going to look at your feet, then, sir. I’ll be quick.”

He should just let her do it, he knew. It would be the fastest way to get rid of her — and now he wanted to get rid of her more than anything. But as soon as she lifted the blanket, he found himself curling his knees to his chest, moving his injured feet out of her reach. He could feel his chest rising and falling rapidly, and he tried to cover his reaction by shooting Yon-Durok an undeserved glare. When she reached for his bandaged feet again, he curled up tighter, snatching them out of her grasp yet again.

“Sir—” she started.

“Privacy,” Thrawn said with his knees pulled up to his chest, trying desperately to mimic the word he’d heard a medic say in Basic earlier. He could tell from the look on her face that he hadn’t quite gotten it right. “ _Please,_ ” he said, and this one, he knew, came out right. Heavily-accented, but in Basic. 

Yon-Durok wavered, looking from the stern expression he’d forced onto his face to the unused medical supplies waiting on a table nearby. She wrung her hands.

“I’m supposed to—”

Thrawn felt his heart rate kick up another notch at her protest and knew he couldn’t stand it much longer.

“Curtain,” he said, trying desperately to get his point across. He pointed to the circular curtain rod above his bed, but Yon-Durok didn’t glance up. “Privacy,” he tried again, his voice ragged. Then, when this still didn’t work, he took the deepest breath he could force himself to take and said, in heavily-accented tones, “ _Faro_. Commodore Faro. Please.”

Yon-Durok’s expression shifted at once into something almost like understanding.

“Of course, sir,” she said, nodding her head. She looked relieved to have a mission, however vague, that would allow her to step away from him. “I’ll be right back,” she promised. 

Thrawn watched her go, his chest heaving, his entire body taken over by an inexplicable chill. He waited till Yon-Durok’s back was turned and then leaned over the railing on his bed at once, forcing his bandaged fingers to close around the curtain. He tugged on it as she left the room, but the curtain just rattled on its rings.

He couldn’t get it to move. 

Cursing, Thrawn shifted positions, leaning on his elbow so as not to put weight on his injured wrist. He yanked harder on the curtain, but only succeeded in budging it a few centimeters. After a moment of struggling with it, he sat back, letting the curtain go; he’d have to stand if he wanted to pull it all the way around his bed, and he couldn’t stand without crutches, especially not after he’d slammed his ankle into the railing earlier. And he didn’t yet know where his crutches had gone. Perhaps that privilege had been revoked while he was sleeping. 

Breathing heavily, Thrawn bowed his head so no one at the medics’ station could see what he was doing. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his hospital gown and cursed again. 

Faro would come, he knew. Even if he did anger her earlier, she would come when Yon-Durok asked. If she wasn’t occupied, she would come at once. If she _was_ occupied…

He lifted his head a little, resting his bandaged hands against his knees so that they partially covered his face. His throat was tight; he could hear someone stepping out of the nurses’ station, perhaps to check on him, so he deliberately turned his head to face the other away. The chill from earlier hadn’t faded yet, and as he suppressed a shiver, he thought inexplicably of the temple.

And the way his teeth ached.

And the taste of blood on his tongue.

And the chair.

Biting the inside of his cheek, Thrawn forced the image away and watched the door, waiting for Faro to return.

* * *

“A disturbance, my Lord?” said Faro carefully.

There was nothing but the sound of his respirator in response. Where was he now? Faro wondered. The last she’d heard, the Executor was somewhere in the Core, handling a dispute over Corellia — about as far from the Chimaera as one could get. So at least she didn’t have to worry about him storming the ship anytime soon. And perhaps there was a delay in the signal; she waited patiently for a response from Vader, but nothing ever came. 

Could he read her mind over such a distance, and over comm? Faro thought of the way the ion cannon had discharged on its own and felt a sinking feeling in her gut. Could that be what he meant by a disturbance in the Force?

But Thrawn wasn’t Force-sensitive, so it couldn’t be. Still, she found herself reaching out to him, vaguely thinking that the mix of his ciphered, alien mind with Faro’s human one might throw Vader off if he tried to peek into her thoughts.

“My Lord,” said Faro after a moment of silence from Vader, “I’d like to direct you to Grand Admiral Thrawn, but—”

“Then do so,” said Vader, his tone allowing no room for argument. Faro’s mouth went dry.

“I will as soon as possible,” she said carefully, waiting subconsciously for the squeeze of an invisible hand around her throat. “But the admiral is currently planet-side. Perhaps you’ve seen our recent reports on a suspected Jedi or Jedi-adjacent temple in the Unknown Regions?”

She knew Vader didn’t typically bother to read reports from other ships. There was a brief silence as he digested the news.

“The Jedi are dead,” he said at last.

“Of course, sir,” said Faro quickly, her gut twisting. “I only meant—”

Something about Vader’s continued silence felt dangerous. She stopped herself, considering her next words carefully.

“It’s only that there’s been some odd behavior from the temple, my Lord,” she said, thinking of the shifting walls of mutasteel. “Grand Admiral Thrawn is investigating it himself. Perhaps that temple is the disturbance you’ve sensed.”

That last sentence, she knew, was either exactly what she needed to say or it was a grievous error, one that might get her punished or even killed, since Vader was involved. She adjusted her collar a little so she would be able to feel invisible fingers around her neck the moment they appeared. If she cut the comlink as soon as she felt them, perhaps she would get by.

“This temple…” Vader started. 

Faro waited, letting out a slow, quiet breath through her teeth. There was a pause, filled only by Vader’s respirator, as he considered his words.

“I will meet with the Grand Admiral in one hour,” said Vader, sending a spike of panic right to Faro’s heart.

“One hour,” she repeated, her voice weak. “Yes, sir. I — shall I inform the docking bay to expect your shuttle, or would you like us to—”

“Via holo, Commodore,” said Vader with a touch of impatience.

A touch of impatience that _should_ have been terrifying, Faro thought. But instead, it sent a wave of relief through her that she couldn’t help but lean into. _Via_ _holo_. That would still be tricky, but she and Thrawn could pull off a holo meeting far easier than they could fake their way through a physical encounter.

“Yes, my Lord,” she said. “I’ll let the Grand Admiral know at once.”

Vader didn’t bother to respond. He ended the call without even tacking on some menacing comment at the end. Faro turned her comlink off and took a deep breath, faintly aware of the fact that her tunic was sticking to her skin from sweat.

It didn’t occur to her to wonder why she’d obfuscated on Thrawn’s behalf. It seemed to go without saying that High Command shouldn’t know — _couldn’t_ know — what had happened on the deserted planet beneath them. If they knew Thrawn’s linguistic abilities had been compromised (temporarily, Faro hoped) or that the temple had chosen him as a vessel (whatever that meant) or that he was currently in sick bay with wounds that bacta couldn’t seem to heal…

Faro took another deep breath, passing a hand over her eyes.

She would never keep secrets like that for any other commanding officer, yet here, she hadn’t hesitated for a moment before lying on Thrawn's behalf. She’d altered her report without thinking anything of it, and now she’d hidden the truth from Darth Vader as well. Was it because of her bond with Thrawn? The anchor/vessel relationship she’d pushed them both into without thinking?

Or was it something else?

It was his leadership, she tried to convince herself. Everyone else on the survey team had altered their reports, too, delicately making no mention of the throne room or its attack on Thrawn. And everyone knew what it would mean to the Chimaera if High Command found a reason to remove him from command.

That was it, she told herself, clutching the comlink tightly. That was all.

And now she had to figure out what to tell Vader over holo, one hour from now. Which cut into all the time she’d allotted herself to burn off her residual anger at Thrawn. 

This was … this was fine.

She steeled herself and headed back to sick bay.

* * *

When she walked in, Thrawn was lying on his back with the curtain open and his hospital-issue blanket folded into a small square over his face. Faro hesitated; her first irrational thought was so extreme that it was almost laughable — just for a moment, she’d thought that he’d died and the Chief Medical Officer had placed the blanket over him. But she could see his chest rising and falling from across the room — and they would have at least commed her if Thrawn’s condition worsened that badly — and besides, she could still feel the vague swirl of his thoughts against her own.

She approached the bed quickly, pulling the curtain shut around them. At the sound of the rings clattering against the rod, Thrawn tensed and raised a hand, touching the blanket but not removing it.

“How did you manage to fold this?” Faro asked him, gently pushing his bandaged hand away. Thrawn sat up as if electrified at the sound of her voice, just as Faro was reaching for the blanket — his skull collided with her hand so violently that she pulled away with a hiss, massaging her knuckles. Thrawn was undeterred; he sat up straight, letting the blanket fall onto his lap.

“ _Faro_ ,” he said in his strange new accent, his eyes burning into hers.

Faro hesitated, studying his face. He looked uncharacteristically exhausted; there were lines of tension and pain around his eyes, which were unusually bright. His gaze was so intense and so harsh that he looked almost angry, but she could sense no anger inside him at all. She glanced down at his right leg — the one he’d smashed against the rails to drive her away — and resisted the urge to ask him about it.

“We have a situation,” she told him, sinking into the chair next to his bed.

Thrawn propped himself up against the headboard and leaned toward her, his face sharpening. Faro caught a wave of intense relief from him as she sat down; she saw his posture relax minutely the moment her trousers touched the seat. An interesting reaction, but one she didn't have time to examine now. She leaned toward him; Thrawn leaned toward her, obviously understanding the need for confidentiality. 

“It’s Darth Vader,” Faro said, lowering her voice.

Thrawn’s expression didn’t change. He had the same narrow-eyed look of contemplation he sometimes wore on the bridge.

“He called me just after I left,” Faro continued. “He said he’s felt a disturbance in the Force; I told him you were planet-side, inspecting the temple, and I told him a little bit about the situation, but…”

With a sigh, she closed her eyes, focusing on the memory and pushing it Thrawn’s way. When she opened her eyes again, she could see how his gaze turned inward, his eyes shifting blindly from one corner of the sick bay to the next as he mentally examined her conversation with Darth Vader as she recalled it. Gradually, he seemed to come back to the present, focusing on her face again.

“He wishes…” said Thrawn with some difficulty; a jolt went through Faro when she heard him using Basic. “...to speak … personally? At me?”

Faro opened her mouth.

“To me,” Thrawn corrected himself.

Faro hadn’t been about to correct his grammar. “Yes, sir,” she said. “In one hour.”

To her surprise, another wave of relief went through Thrawn. He seemed to brighten substantially, a spark returning to his eyes as he sat up straighter. He lifted his bandaged hands and looked at Faro, projecting an image of crutches into her mind.

“A hoverchair would be more likely, I think,” said Faro, eyeing his ankles. She could still feel echoes of insistent, sharp pain coming from them when she allowed that part of Thrawn’s mind into hers. “And I’m glad _you’re_ so happy about it, sir, but what are we going to do?”

“ _You_ speak to him,” said Thrawn. Faro could see how he was finding Basic now; he was rearranging a handful of sentences in his head, picking out words spoken to him by both Faro and someone named Yon-Durok to find the phrases he needed. He tossed the folded blanket away from him — and again, Faro wanted to ask why he’d had it over his face to begin with, and again, the situation at hand stopped her.

“Hoverchair,” he said, a firm tone of command in his voice.

“You have a plan?” Faro asked, eyeing his hospital gown and the obvious wounds at his temples. "He can't see you like this, sir. He'll ask questions."

“I have a plan,” Thrawn confirmed. He gestured for her to pull the curtain back, and Faro caught a hint of something she suspected was _irony_ from him as he did so.

She’d have to ask about that later, too. 

“Hoverchair,” Thrawn said again, scanning the sick bay and pointing toward the opposite side of the room with one bandaged hand. Faro got up with a sigh and collected the hoverchair without bothering to check with the medics if it was alright. She could see the CMO tending to an ensign across the room, and watching her out of the corner of his eye with a sort of weary resignation on his face.

 _Sorry,_ Faro mouthed at him. She switched the hoverchair on and guided it back toward Thrawn, whose mind was whirling across multiple topics at the same time. She caught him rifling through the cabinets next to his bed, searching for a pair of scrubs to pull on beneath his hospital gown.

“Here,” Faro said, touching his shoulder as she came up beside him. Her skin didn’t touch his — only his hospital gown — but for a moment, both of them became inexplicably light-headed. Faro stopped in her tracks, blinking rapidly. On the hospital bed, Thrawn leaned into her touch, lifting one hand instinctively as if to grab her wrist. He stopped himself and then looked at her oddly, and she caught a strange sense from him — it was like he’d received a burst of energy out of nowhere, and a mild fog in his mind had disappeared. Some of the Ancient Skimscrip in his head twisted and morphed, revealing words in Basic that he hadn’t had access to before.

They stared at each other for a moment, neither saying a word. Faro recovered first. She opened the bottom drawer on the cabinet and selected a pair of trousers in light blue, shaking the feeling of light-headedness away. “Can you put them on by yourself or do you need help?” she asked.

The eager, half-distracted expression of concentration on Thrawn’s face seemed to lock into place at that question. His thoughts jumped off their prescribed tracks for a moment. “ _Bu tarshaud izeyu,_ ” he said, reaching for the trousers. 

“Just swing your legs over the side of the bed,” Faro told him, holding the trousers out of his reach. “I won’t be able to see anything because of your gown.”

Thrawn shot her a wave of exasperation; it was different from the way she normally felt his emotions, Faro realized. This felt like it was deliberately _directed_ at her — and if that were so, it meant Thrawn was learning to exert more control over their connection. She mused over this as he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, disabling the railing.

Faro scrunched up the trousers, guiding Thrawn’s bandaged feet through the holes. She tugged the trousers up to his knees and then stopped at the edge of the hospital gown, gesturing for him to stand.

Thrawn hesitated. He thought of the pain in his ankles — and with a jolt of surprise, Faro realized it wasn’t the pain’s effect on _him_ that he was worried about. He studied her face as if trying to gauge the wisdom of standing, and Faro could see the memory of their argument earlier — when he’d smashed his ankle against the railing — playing in his head.

“I can take it,” she told him. “If I know it’s coming in advance, I can block the pain out.”

Thrawn didn’t respond for a moment; she could see, through his mind, how he measured her facial temperature to determine whether she was lying. Finally, he nodded and stood gingerly, putting most of his weight on Faro.

She let him lean on her, waiting patiently for him to get his balance, and then transferred her hands rather awkwardly to his waist. Thrawn grabbed hold of the hospital trousers at the same time, swaying a little as he let go of her shoulders. He kept his head down, avoiding her eyes as he pulled the trousers up beneath his hospital gown. His mind was centered entirely on the warmth of her palms against his hips, and the longer she touched him, the more alive he seemed to feel, until she could sense him almost vibrating with energy. The pain in his wrists and ankles had faded almost entirely away.

She wasn’t sure she’d ever been this close to him, Faro thought. They were practically nose to nose, especially since his head was tilted down. She could see little freckles, dark blue in color, scattered across his cheekbones and close to his eyes.

She’d never noticed them before. 

Blindly and clumsily, Thrawn did up the snaps on the trousers and raised his head, his nose nearly brushing against hers as he did so. He leaned back a little, his eyes burning into hers with an intensity that made Faro want to look away. He'd garnered more Basic in the short time they'd been touching, as if by osmosis: _freckles, warmth, invigorated,_ all plucked straight from Faro's mind.

“How are we going to do this?” Faro asked.

Thrawn glanced at the hoverchair, and at his gesture, Faro helped him into it. He fiddled with the controls and simultaneously projected an image her way — or more accurately, projected an entire scenario. Faro saw a strange-looking version of herself speaking mostly in Ancient Skimscrip, with a few Basic words thrown in at random here and there. She was in Thrawn’s office, with his holopod turned to face her. Thrawn sat nearby, listening intently but not chiming in.

He, too, was odd-looking, and Faro realized belatedly it was because Thrawn only knew his own reflection — whereas Faro only knew hers, and was startled by this more true rendition of herself in Thrawn’s mind.

“What’ll I tell him?” Faro asked, staring at the mental image of Darth Vader as Thrawn keyed his hoverchair forward. She followed him out of sick bay, absently correcting the image he had of himself in his mind — sharpening his cheekbones, changing the part of his hair and the alignment of his eyes.

Thrawn glanced over his shoulder at her, looking for her datapad. She handed it to him and he took it with both hands, silently requesting that she steer the hoverchair for him when necessary.

Clumsily — and grimacing with pain the whole time — Thrawn downloaded a Basic dictionary to Faro’s datapad and started scrolling through it, his eyes flicking rapidly from one page to the next. All it took was seeing the words for them to unveil themselves in his mind, Ancient Skimscrip transforming into Basic at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t so much like learning a language as it was an archaeological dig, Faro thought — the words were buried in his mind, and all he had to do was uncover them.

“Tell him,” said Thrawn, retaining his strange new accent, “that I am still planet-side. He cannot punish you over the holo from this distance.”

Faro nodded. She didn’t ask Thrawn how he knew.

“Tell him,” Thrawn continued, “of the temple and our difficulty translating. And tell him of Lieutenant Orsun’s death. It will dissuade him from examining the temple personally.”

Faro gave him a doubtful look as she steered the hoverchair around a corner. “You really think that’ll scare _Darth Vader_ off?”

“No,” said Thrawn, his eyes fixed on her datapad. “It will make him think I’m floundering and perhaps in need of help. He will relish that; he won’t rush here to ease my burden. Similarly, the Emperor will see it as a challenge to my skills and will likely leave us alone a while longer to see if I can rise to meet it. Counter-intuitively, if there were no obvious obstacles or missteps, both would be more eager to step in. We need to give them motivation to stay away.”

Faro said nothing; she could follow Thrawn’s reasoning — with a little help from their mental bond, since more and more of his brain was shifting from Skimscrip to Basic. She picked up threads of memories; similar situations he’d been in, snippets of long-past conversations with the Emperor and Vader. Thrawn seemed confident in his analysis, and that was enough for her.

It had been three days since he went into the temple, and Faro realized she wasn’t sure she’d felt confidence from him even briefly since then. Not until now.

She steered the hoverchair into his office and set up the holopod, vaguely aware of the too-quick machinations of Thrawn’s mind. He kept his eyes on the dictionary, but there was a constant mental countdown going on in the background, and every now and then he pushed a line of dialogue toward her, instructing her in what to say when the call came through.

An hour passed.

Faro checked her chrono, took a deep breath, and flicked the holopod on. Darth Vader’s form fizzled into view scarcely a minute later, without any fanfare and only the sound of his respirator to accompany him.

He took in Faro’s form silently, saying nothing. Across the holopod, out of sight, Thrawn set his Basic dictionary aside and leaned forward, his eyes sharp as he analyzed Vader’s form.

“Commodore,” said Vader finally, his voice impossible to read. “Am I to understand the Grand Admiral did not heed my request for a meeting?”

Faro forced herself not to glance at Thrawn; it wouldn’t do for Vader to see her eyes constantly shift to something out of his line of sight.

“Grand Admiral Thrawn is still planet-side, my Lord,” Faro said. “He’s been delayed by some problems with the temple.”

When Vader didn’t answer, Faro felt Thrawn’s mind reaching out to hers, counting down the seconds until she should speak again. He kept his eyes on Vader, but gave her a nod when it came to zero.

“We’ve lost a lieutenant, my Lord,” said Faro. She didn’t need to fake the heaviness in her voice. Thrawn tilted his head, seeing something in Vader’s impassive form that Faro couldn’t; he glanced over at her and gave her an encouraging nod. 

“The temple is made of ancient mutasteel, sir,” Faro explained. “It seems to have gained a mind of its own since the planet was last inhabited. The admiral is overseeing experiments now, but so far, we…” She hesitated, purely for show. “We haven’t been able to get it under control.”

For a long time, Vader didn’t speak. He didn’t ask how Lt. Orsun had died; he didn’t seem to care. Faro held still, refusing to wilt under his gaze, and across from her she saw Thrawn’s eyes go hooded as he withdrew a little from the conversation. He was quietly plotting out the next several steps.

“And the Jedi artifacts?” Vader asked.

It was exactly what Thrawn had told her he’d say. He slid Faro’s datapad across the desk quietly; he’d already pulled the survey photos up for her.

“Keying them to you now, my Lord,” Faro said. 

She waited through the 10-second transmission delay. Vader’s helmet angled down as he received the images. After a moment, he looked up again, making a scornful sound.

“Your admiral is not so all-knowing as he thinks,” Vader said. Across from Faro, Thrawn’s lips lifted in a sardonic smile. “These,” said Vader, glancing back down at his datapad, “are _not_ Jedi artifacts. Nor are they Sith.”

Faro put a politely confused look on her face. It wasn’t entirely faked; she was old enough to remember the Jedi, despite Imperial propaganda. But she’d never heard of the Sith before. “I’m sure the admiral will be interested to hear that,” she said. “What religion _are_ they, Lord Vader?”

She could hear the soft clunk of Vader’s datapad as he set it down again. “I have no interest in the dead religions of lesser men,” he said dismissively. “Your admiral will solve this issue in time for his next campaign, Commodore, or he will bear the wrath of the Emperor. See to it that he knows.”

Across from Faro, Thrawn was nodding and waving his hand in an impatient circle.

“Yes, my Lord,” said Faro. She didn’t have to feign the dryness in her mouth. “I’ll let him know.”

“See that you do,” said Vader, his voice dark. Before Faro could respond, he cut the comm.

There was a brief silence in Thrawn’s office. Quietly, he reached for Faro’s datapad and slid it back toward him.

“Redundant, isn’t he?” Thrawn said.

Faro sagged in her chair.


	8. Chapter 8

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Faro was exhausted, and she could feel from Thrawn’s mind that he was cognizant of that, and he was more than willing to quietly study his dictionary until she felt ready to talk. In fact, when she looked closer, she realized there was another motivator — not just concern for her well-being, but a faint nervousness that she might force him back into the sick bay, leaving him with no way to work off his surge of energy or the feelings of uselessness that had been dogging him since their mission planet-side.

Thrawn kept his eyes on his datapad, quietly hoping that if he didn’t engage Faro at all, she would forget she was supposed to bring him back. Faro gave him a weary look.

“I’m not going to force you back into sick bay yet,” she told him.

Thrawn glanced up at her, pulling an unconvincing look of surprise, as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. 

“The linguistics team is supposed to meet me in the conference room in…” Faro checked her chrono. “In about forty-five minutes. I can reroute them here, if you want. I figured you’d want to sit in.”

Thrawn’s lips quirked in dry amusement. He stared down at the datapad, not touching it in case another electric surge came over him.

 _You were hoping to meet them without me,_ he said. _You made the appointment with them right after I…_

He flashed her an image of himself slamming his ankle into the railing, and for the first time — through his memory — Faro understood the words he’d snarled at her in Ancient Skimscrip: _Stay out of my head._

Faro grimaced, brushing this memory aside. They would need to discuss that later; Thrawn couldn’t continue hurting himself — and her — every time he wanted privacy, and he needed to know he could always ask her to leave when necessary. But more pressing at the moment…

 _You were able to read my mind?_ Faro asked, raising her eyebrows at him. _To tell I wanted to meet the linguistics team alone?_

Thrawn looked at her blankly for a moment, and her surge of excitement on his behalf faded away.

 _No,_ he said somewhat sheepishly. He replayed for her the train of thoughts and observations that had led him to the conclusion that she’d hoped to meet the team without him.

“Oh,” said Faro aloud, grimacing with disappointment.

“Oh, indeed,” Thrawn said. He rubbed his cheek and switched back to mental communication. _We’ve scarcely had time to test the parameters of this bond,_ he said. _We must find time to experiment with it, between our—_

There was a flicker of exasperation as he corrected himself mid-thought.

 _Between_ your _shifts on the bridge,_ he finished.

Faro gave him a sympathetic look. _You’ll be back before long,_ she said. _The wounds on your wrists and ankles don’t really proscribe bridge service._

Thrawn rubbed his cheek again. Part of his mind focused on the unpleasant rasp of stubble against his palm. The other part focused on more concerning things — the unexplained electrical discharges, the bouts of exhaustion that seemed to have no distinct trigger, the times he’d lost consciousness without explanation.

 _The chair,_ he thought, not meaning to project this to her. There was an air of longing attached to the edges of this thought. If he could sit in the chair again … he was certain they’d interrupted its process, certain Faro had pulled him away too soon…

“Too soon?” said Faro sharply. “Too soon for what?”

Thrawn glanced at her, blinked, and forced his thoughts out of Basic and back into Ancient Skimscrip.

“Perhaps if the extraction process had been slower,” he said, “I would not be quite so incapacitated as I am now.”

Faro blinked at him, stung by the implicit accusation in his words. _She’d_ been the one to extract him from the chair, after all. But while his words were accusatory, his emotions — his emotions were a different story. There was no sense of blame or anger there, only quiet contemplation; his thought process was detached from his emotions entirely. She could read irritation from him, but when she tracked that emotion down, she found that its source was in the growth of blue-black stubble on his cheeks.

Belatedly, he noticed her irritation.

“I did not mean to accuse you of negligence,” Thrawn said. “You were given few options at the temple. I believe you made the right choice.”

Faro shook her head and checked her chrono again. “We’re going to keep talking about this,” she warned him, “but I have to ask you something first.”

Anxiety spiked in Thrawn at that, taking her by surprise.

“It’s not like that,” she said quickly, but the anxiety didn’t fade. “It’s just about your beard.”

The anxiety flickered and disappeared. Thrawn’s eyebrows furrowed at her, and Faro gestured to his cheeks.

“You can’t shave?” she asked.

Thrawn thought of his wrists, the way his hands shook, and how difficult it was for him to curl his fingers around a pencil. “No,” he said.

“And the medics won’t help you?” Faro asked.

Thrawn’s emotions shifted so quickly she couldn’t get a grasp on them. “I haven’t asked,” he said, his voice tight. “They have more important duties to attend to.”

“Well,” said Faro, and hesitated. She forced herself to say the next words before she could change her mind. “Would you like _me_ to?”

Thrawn sat back in his chair, staring at her with blatant surprise. Through his mind, she could feel his heart thudding in his chest — and not necessarily _pleasantly_ , she noted. He looked her up and down, clearly uncomfortable with the offer, and she could see him working through the pros and cons in his head. She pulled away, allowing him some privacy to think it over.

Finally, his eyes swiveled past Faro to the small refresher, and she saw through his memories where he kept his razor and extra blades.

“I would like that,” he said haltingly, his voice unreadable. 

“You’re sure?” Faro asked, and Thrawn gave her an aggrieved look. “Well, come to the fresher with me, then,” Faro said, pushing herself to her feet. She walked past Thrawn, giving him the chance to change his mind while her back was turned, but she heard his hoverchair whirring as she stepped through the fresher door. 

She was rooting through his cupboards by the time he joined her, leaving his hoverchair outside. He walked gingerly past her, leaning on the counter and keeping all his weight on his left foot. He scanned the tub while Faro looked at the toilet, both of them trying to figure out where he should sit. 

Finally, thinking of the still-unexplained and unremembered blackout he’d had in the power core, Thrawn opted for the tub, and although it would fall to Faro to help him up again, she didn’t argue with him. He surprised her somewhat by lowering himself into it rather than sitting on the edge, but then he tipped his head back against the porcelain and she understood; now she could shave him without needing to manipulate his head this way and that.

She located his razor and keyed the soap dispenser for depilatory shaving cream so they wouldn’t have to repeat this process anytime soon. She peeled open the tub of cream it deposited in her hand, and Thrawn didn’t protest when the chemical scent of depilatory gel filled the air, so she figured he was fine with it. 

She filled a basin with warm water, grabbed his razor, and perched on the edge of the tub.

“You said you think the temple’s process was interrupted somehow,” she said in a conversational tone. “What process is that, exactly?”

She dumped the tub of cream into her hands and rubbed it into a froth between her palms. Thrawn watched her for a moment, half-dreading and half-anticipating what came next. When she put her palms against his cheeks, both of them froze, Faro’s eyes widening and Thrawn’s eyes fluttering closed. 

She hadn’t touched his skin until now, she realized — not while he was conscious. His mind drew hers in, letting her see the memories of the day without filter, and with more clarity and fluency than ever before. She saw the dead space in his mind where he’d been blacked out, and felt the subtle shift of vibrations in the deck that showed the Chimaera had jumped to hyperspace at the same moment that Thrawn’s memories abruptly cut off.

Swirling forward, she saw the moments after he’d slammed his injured ankle into the railing — after she’d left — when a young petty officer ( _Yon-Durok,_ Thrawn’s brain supplied) had tried to speak to him. Faro felt every single one of Thrawn’s emotions as if they were her own and broke away from him at the exact moment that, in his memory, Yon-Durok reached for his hand and tried to reassure him. The rest of the memory followed her as she stood, less intense but still clear: Thrawn pulling his feet out of Yon-Durok’s grasp; the panic attack; the way he’d tugged at the curtain, unable to pull it around his bed; the quick glance he’d shot toward the nurses’ station as he wiped his eyes.

Turning to the sink, Faro took a deep breath and wiped her eyes, too. She looked up at her reflection and saw the dampness on her cheeks, but now that she wasn’t touching Thrawn, the tears felt foreign and strange, as if someone else had taken over her body for a moment and left her struggling to figure out what they’d done. The surge of emotion inside her had faded and cooled, leaving her worn-out, raw.

She glanced at Thrawn and caught him wiping the shaving cream off his face, trying ardently to keep his expression blank. 

_—knew this wouldn’t work,_ he was telling himself. No, _berating_ himself. Faro hesitated, then turned the faucet on and washed her face in the sink. By the time she dried off, Thrawn was sitting up in the bathtub, his face clean but wooden, his eyes fixed on the wall. He’d already decided on Faro’s behalf that she wouldn’t try to help him again. 

He studiously pretended not to notice when Faro keyed the dispensary for another tub of shaving cream. He continued staring at the wall when Faro re-took her seat on the edge of the tub.

“Let’s have a do-over,” said Faro with a sigh. 

Thrawn’s eyes snapped to her. She couldn’t read his face, but she could read his mind just fine, and saw the embarrassment and dread inside him, both associated with Yon-Durok — and now with Faro as well. 

Worried about how much she’d seen, Faro realized. Worried about whether she’d seen the panic attack, and whether it would change the way she thought of him. 

She emptied the tub of shaving cream into her hands again and this time disconnected herself from Thrawn’s mind entirely before she spread the cream over his cheeks. She couldn’t sense his thoughts or emotions this way, and knowing this lifted a weight off her shoulders. He held still, but this time he didn’t close his eyes; he studied her face as she worked, his gaze cold and piercing, searching her for something. Faro couldn’t be sure what.

She dipped his razor in the basin of warm water and, since she wasn’t making eye contact, decided to lie.

“I apologize for my loss of composure,” she said, her voice neutral. “I don’t know what came over me, exactly. It was just … all kinds of emotion, all at once.”

Thrawn’s eyes narrowed. He held still as she leaned forward, cupping his chin in one hand and placing the razor against his cheek. She drew a careful line halfway down his jaw, stopped, rinsed the razor, and started again. Tentatively, she eased up on the barricade between their minds.

 _You didn’t see any memories to accompany the emotions?_ Thrawn asked at once.

“No,” said Faro aloud. She rinsed the razor again; through Thrawn’s mind, she could see her own face — he saw heightened heat around her cheeks, but couldn’t decide if it indicated a lie or embarrassment over her tears. She placed the razor against his cheek again, this time running it smoothly down the curve of his jaw; she could feel him tearing her words apart and rearranging them at a dizzying pace, organizing them into a sort of logic-map that included her temperature, her body language, her life history (as he knew it) and cultural upbringing.

He didn’t believe her.

At the same time — perhaps because of his own life history and cultural upbringing — he couldn’t figure out why she would lie. Perhaps to spare him embarrassment, he thought (and Faro had to work hard to keep her face blank when she heard him stumble across her exact motivation), but to Faro’s surprise, he dismissed this option after a moment’s consideration. There was no reason for her to spare him that, he decided. To do so would indicate a certain level of personal care or friendship, and Faro viewed him as nothing more than a commanding officer—

She worked very hard not to let him see how much this thought shocked and offended her.

—and a particularly distasteful one at that, he thought, with no hint of sadness or regret. The mental image that accompanied this thought was one of Faro when she was still a commander, staring at her then-new CO with open resentment. An image of Eli Vanto — still an ensign, and openly hostile — followed shortly after. _Same category,_ Thrawn decided.

Faro paused, nearly nicking his upper lip with the razor, and pulled back a little. Thrawn thought…? But even if she’d resented him once, she’d changed since then. She’d…

Her thoughts whirled around each other, each one abandoned before it could really begin. She wanted desperately to correct him — it was almost impossible to bite her tongue — but to do so would only prove that she _had_ been lying. She took a deep breath and shook her thoughts away; she could tell him later, she told herself. For now, she tried to keep her face blank and continued shaving him.

This became exponentially easier when his thoughts wandered from how Faro thought of him to the more self-conscious question of how his breath smelled.

 _It smells like toothpaste,_ Faro informed him. She felt a flicker of surprise (he hadn’t realized she was reading his thoughts) and relief at this, mingled with irritation that he’d been caught thinking something so trivial.

“You were saying something about the temple’s process being interrupted,” Faro reminded him.

Thrawn had no issue jumping backward to find his train of thought. _It was making me its vessel,_ he said. _I don’t believe it completed that process._

“So…” Faro tilted his chin slightly so she could access the left side of his face. “What do you think it means to be the vessel? Completely?”

 _Perhaps control over the temple,_ Thrawn said. _Perhaps not. Perhaps a telekinetic bond with the mutasteel itself; perhaps not. The Ecclethes were spiritual; perhaps they saw some metaphysical element to it, something which won’t come to fruition in reality. I find the lingering electric impulses and occasional blackouts concerning. Perhaps—_

She ran the razor over his skin like she’d already done a dozen times, but this time his thoughts fractured. His eyes shifted up to meet hers, sending a jolt through both of them. 

_Where did you learn to do this?_ Thrawn asked. He was concentrating every ounce of his brain on this specific question, trying to obfuscate what he was really thinking — which was so vague and sense-based anyway that Faro could hardly suss it out; all she knew was that the rasp of the razor against his skin and the close proximity of their bodies had triggered something in him, something not entirely pleasant; something he didn’t want her to examine too closely.

“I dated someone once who liked me to help him shave,” Faro said, rinsing the razor. 

Thrawn absorbed this information with a flicker of surprise and a vivid mental image of someone — someone blue and _definitely_ female — parting her legs so he could shave what little pubic hair was there. He ran a finger along the length of her vulva, parting the deep blue lips, drawing shivers of delight as he leaned closer to—

Faro choked on her own spit and fumbled with the razor, accidentally knocking the water basin into the tub with Thrawn. He bolted upright, but wasn’t quick enough to avoid the basin; it hit the side of the tub with a loud _clank_ and spilled a mix of water and depilatory shaving cream all over his hospital gown.

“ _Damn it,_ ” Faro said, grabbing the now-empty bowl. Her cheeks were burning as she deposited it on the fresher floor. Thrawn raised an eyebrow at her and plucked at his wet clothes. “Why the hell did you project something like that at me?” Faro demanded.

“Something like what?” said Thrawn, genuinely baffled. He tracked back over his thoughts; he'd been focused mostly on the question of who Faro had dated in the past, whether it was someone aboard the Chimaera, someone he perhaps knew, or—

Faro shared the image with him and watched as Thrawn’s eyes widened with horror and his cheeks burned a darker shade of blue. The woman’s face — whoever she was — popped into his mind. Young, pretty, aristocratic-looking — Faro shoved this automatic assessment out of her mind.

“That’s—” Thrawn started, then cut himself off, blushing even harder. “Well, you—”

Faro waved his explanation away. “That is _not_ what I meant when I said I helped my partner shave,” she said, completely incapable of meeting Thrawn’s eyes.

Thrawn held his wet hospital gown away from his chest and gave her a genuinely apologetic and half-mortified look. “I’m sorry, Commodore. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine,” said Faro. Her cheeks were still red; she could feel Thrawn firmly locking up all his x-rated memories and pushing them to the very back of his mind. She motioned for him to lay back against the edge of the tub and he obeyed somewhat jerkily, allowing her to finish shaving what little stubble was left on his cheeks. Faro could feel the heat coming off his skin as she shaved him, and she could see her own blush through his eyes, looking ten times worse than it felt. When she was done, Faro leaned back and switched on the water in the tub rather than bother filling the basin again. 

Thrawn pulled his feet away from the faucet to save his bandages, and she caught a glimmer of amusement from him as she ran the razor under the water. Faro huffed out a little laugh of her own as her blush finally cooled and she managed to move past the Chiss woman in his memory; she glanced at him, his hospital gown and scrubs both covered in watery-looking shaving cream.

“Did you want to take a shower, while we’re here?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Thrawn shook his head, a distracted, self-deprecating smile tugging at his lips. He sat up a little straighter as Faro shut the water off and got to work putting everything back into place.

“I have some clothing stored in the living quarters connected to the office,” Thrawn told her. He sent her a detailed mental map of where she could find them. 

“Okay,” said Faro. “I’ll be right back.”

She put the wash basin back in place on Thrawn’s fresher counter and then hit the door release, crossing his office floor to reach the makeshift living quarters where — his memories now informed her — he sometimes crashed for an hour or two between long days of work. Already, his thoughts were turning back toward the temple with an intensity that worried her.

The bunk was nothing more than a standard trooper’s cot, Faro noticed, and it was completely stripped of linens (a quick glimpse into Thrawn’s mind showed her that ~~the temple~~ he did this in an attempt to discourage himself ~~the chair~~ from sleeping here unless it was necessary; a brief memory of Eli Vanto flared in him: _You need to sleep in a_ real _bed, sir,_ Vanto said, the exasperation in his voice clear. _You can’t keep camping out at your desk or on the floor. And no, that trooper cot does_ not _count as a bed_ ).

 _The temple,_ he thought, almost wistfully. _The chair_ ….

The memory of Vanto was accompanied by a sense of exhaustion that came over Faro like a tidal wave. Inside the fresher, Thrawn’s burst of energy had abruptly faded; he pressed his palms against his eyes and tried to muscle past a sudden headache.

 _This wouldn’t happen,_ he told himself, _if_...

There was a trunk tucked away beneath the cot and Faro knelt on the ground to pull it out, ignoring Thrawn as best she could. Inside, neatly folded into squares and carefully organized with plastisteel dividers, were the mostly-outrageous sets of civilian clothes Thrawn had ordered made for various planet-side missions in the past ( _planet-side,_ he thought, and inevitably, images formed in his head: the temple, the mutasteel walls, the pain in his ankles, the taste of blood in his mouth. _The chair_ —). She picked through them until she found something reasonable — slacks and a sweater. Vaguely, she was aware of Thrawn tipping his head back against the edge of the tub, struggling to stay awake. He was gritting his teeth.

She ignored the battered old holodiscs and datacards tucked into Thrawn’s socks. As soon as she saw them and processed what they were, her mind caught the thread of memory inside _Thrawn’s_ mind, and she found herself following it without meaning to — getting glimpses of a world she didn’t recognize, covered in arctic oceans, and Chiss men and women she didn’t know. Whatever was on those holodiscs, it was personal, Faro decided; she shut the trunk and pushed it back beneath Thrawn’s cot. 

She checked on Thrawn, paying closer attention to his thoughts now, and found him wide awake and biting down viciously on his injured fingertips.

 _Hey!_ Faro said, making him jolt with surprise. Thrawn took his hand away from his mouth by reflex, then froze, cursing himself for bringing his hands within his own line of sight and letting Faro get a glimpse of them through his mind. She stormed back into the fresher, confirming what she’d already seen — that Thrawn had taken his bandages off, and that his fingertips were now smeared with blood. He looked up at her with a sort of aggravated guilt from the bathtub.

“What the hell are you doing?” Faro asked, keeping her voice even and low. She threw Thrawn’s civilian clothes onto the counter and folded her hands behind her back so he wouldn’t see them clenching into fists.

“Grounding myself,” said Thrawn calmly. He eyed the clothes she’d brought him. 

~~He wanted to tell her everything~~.

He didn’t want to talk about it.

 ~~If she touched his hand again~~ —

He wished she would go.

“Grounding yourself,” Faro repeated. She wanted to pretend she didn’t know what he meant, but she did; he was thinking of the temple almost obsessively. The chair wormed its way into each of his thoughts, tugging his concentration away — and the only method he’d found to dispel that obsession, to lift the fog in his mind, was through pain. Faro studied him, taking in the quiet plea for understanding on his face; her heart was pounding in her chest, leaving her shaky with a burst of adrenaline and concern. After a moment, she forced herself to take a deep, calming breath and approached the tub, taking Thrawn’s hands in hers.

They both closed their eyes as their minds connected again, just like they had earlier. This time, Faro managed to force a barricade of sorts between them in time to avoid the onslaught of Thrawn’s emotions. She sent a wave of soothing calmness his way and felt him relax incrementally, against his will.

“Are you always this unstable, sir?” she sighed, exasperation coloring what was meant to be a joke, turning her voice snappish and ugly. She looked up at Thrawn in horror, hoping he hadn’t heard her, but he had.

She immediately regretted saying it.

Immediately felt like a monster, in fact.

Thrawn went still, his hands frozen against hers, his eyes still closed and his face blank. After a moment, teeming with hurt that Faro could feel even through the barricade, Thrawn slipped his hands out of her grasp and leaned away from her. His face was closed-off, his eyes cold; she could sense him shutting down his emotions one by one, closing them up inside tiny boxes and making the boxes disappear. He gave her a look of imperious disdain.

“I’m sorry,” Faro said, her heart sinking. Thrawn shifted his gaze back to the clothes she’d brought him. “I didn’t mean…”

“I need to get dressed,” Thrawn told her, his voice even and calm. “We don’t have much time before the linguistics team arrives.”

Faro hesitated, unsure how to fix what she’d done. She studied Thrawn for a moment — he’d taken his scrubs off while she was in the other room, leaving him in only the wet hospital gown, and he placidly avoided her gaze. Faro reached for his clothes and held them in her hands for a moment, staring down at them.

“Sir…” she said. 

Thrawn’s expressionless mask cracked at the sound of her voice. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest and a flush spreading to his ears, but there was no emotion to accompany these sensations. He thought of the chair again, the mutasteel. It had hurt when it bored into him, he decided, but it had almost felt pleasant, too...

“I need to get dressed,” he told her again, and this time his voice was so quiet she could barely hear him. Faro sat down on the edge of the tub, and finally Thrawn glanced her way. He saw her getting ready to speak and shook his head; she saw him bringing his fingers together, subtly digging his thumbnail into the split-open skin on his index finger. “Let’s not talk about it,” he said quickly, a little roughly. 

“I didn’t mean to—” Faro started, but Thrawn shook his head again.

“Please,” he said, with absolutely no emotion in his voice. “It is unnecessary to discuss these things. I cannot control what you see in my head; I’d appreciate it if you heed my wishes when it comes to what we discuss aloud.”

Faro closed her mouth and studied him closer, warring with herself. She still felt she should explain — and apologize — but if it only served to make Thrawn more uncomfortable, she found it hard to justify this urge. She looked down at his clothes, twisting the sweater in her hands.

There were so many things they needed to discuss, she thought in frustration, and yet the words kept getting caught in her throat.

“Do you need help dressing?” she asked.

“I’ll manage,” Thrawn said.

Still, Faro didn’t move. She watched the planes of his face flex as he worked to keep himself blank.

The man _needed_ an apology, she decided, whether he wanted one or not. She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to figure out how to say it. There was no good way to put her feelings into words.

“You’re not unstable, sir,” Faro said finally — and completely inadequately, she knew.

Thrawn sat up straighter and leaned away from her in the same movement, letting his breath out in an exasperated sigh. “Alright,” he said, gesturing impatiently for his clothes. “You may go now.”

Faro handed him the clothes, but made no move to leave. “It’s just unsettling to feel someone else’s emotions alongside your own,” she explained, the words coming out in a rush. “You can’t feel mine. You don’t know how it … I know it’s worse to be spied on, but it’s…” She gestured to her own head, frustrated by the inarticulate, short bursts of sentences coming from her mouth. “It’s not pleasant for me, either, sir,” she said. “It can just be overwhelming sometimes. Especially when you do things like…”

She glanced at his bleeding hands. She thought of his aching right ankle. Thrawn’s eyes flickered coldly over her face, studying her but giving nothing away.

“I understand,” he said finally, his voice unreadable. “You may go, Commodore.”

His tone was subtly different than it had been before, and Faro felt a weight lift from her chest; he believed her, and he accepted the apology. She could tell from his mind, if not from his voice or face. 

“You’ll really be fine on your own?” she said, gesturing to the clothes as she stood. Thrawn waved her off dismissively.

“Don’t patronize me,” he said without any real ire. Faro retreated from the fresher and closed the door behind her, disconnecting somewhat from Thrawn’s mind to give him privacy. She felt the same exhaustion from earlier creep over him again, along with a low-level sense of something she suspected was shame, but he dressed quickly and with minimal awkwardness.

He lifted himself up onto the edge of the tub and then paused, bending over at the waist until his forehead brushed against his knees. He worked through a wave of nausea, dizziness, and pain before summoning her. He did this on purpose, she knew — propped himself up on the edge of the tub without calling her. It hurt his wrists and ankles to do it without assistance, but it was a minor pain (comparatively), and he felt he could get away with it without worsening his injuries.

And without getting scolded. He was taking her recent callous words into account; she’d feel too guilty over what she’d said to make a fuss about this. He could use that to his advantage for a while yet.

Scowling, Faro conceded to herself that he was right.

But he was such a _bastard_ about it, she thought.

 _Faro,_ Thrawn called.

 _Coming,_ she said, already opening the door. Thrawn had already adjusted his posture, his back straight and his head held high, as if he hadn’t nearly fainted a moment ago. The civilian clothes were more form-fitting than his hospital gown, which he’d folded and placed on the floor. Faro eyed him for a moment, uncertain what she thought about it, or what the sudden fluttering feeling in her stomach meant.

Irritation, she decided, and she pushed the feeling away.

She helped Thrawn to his feet and back out into the office just in time for the meeting.


	9. Chapter 9

Thrawn sat with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap, casually hiding the worst of his injuries from the linguistics team. Lieutenant Drodson’s eyes still shifted immediately to Thrawn’s temples the moment he entered the office. The rest of the team, filing in behind him, seemed scared to even glance Thrawn’s way lest they be caught staring.

Faro caught a sense of amusement from Thrawn at that. The idea that _anyone_ found him frightening was still funny to him, even after years of working with skittish humans; as far as he was concerned, the only thing that made him even slightly intimidating was his height. He had a mental image of himself — one that made Faro bite the inside of her cheek — at the age he’d been recruited into the CEDF ( _the what?_ Faro wondered; _was that what they called their Navy where he was from?_ ), gangly and thin, wearing shabby colonial outer gear over his school uniform. 

“Grand Admiral, sir,” said Drodson with a respectful little bow. He was from a traditional Mid Rim world, Faro remembered; some of his old-school manners had survived Imperial training. Drodson stepped forward, holding a datapad out to Thrawn.

There was a pause. Thrawn stared at the datapad, his face fixed in a polite smile. He’d have to use his elbows to grab it, he thought, which meant his efforts at hiding his hands were for nothing. Quickly, before the silence could become too long or awkward, Faro leaned forward across the desk and took the datapad from Drodson, setting it down in front of Thrawn.

 _Thank you,_ he said, and Faro caught a hint of an underthought, something warm and almost affectionate that flitted through his mind but which he didn’t want to share with her: _always anticipates my orders._

 _Not a perfect solution,_ Thrawn added before Faro could process that underthought; he noted the frozen expressions of confusion on the linguistics team members.

 _Better than grabbing it with your elbows,_ Faro said.

“Lieutenant Drodson,” said Thrawn amicably; he sent a wave of amusement Faro’s way in response to her mental image of him fumbling with the datapad. “Chief.”

Chief Narwen, older than Drodson by twenty years but unused to being acknowledged by upper brass, gave Thrawn a startled look. “Sir,” she said. Then, narrowing her eyes and speaking carefully, “It’s good to see you out of medbay.”

 _She was seen for a minor injury yesterday,_ Thrawn told Faro; he was trying to protect Narwen’s privacy, but she could see through his memories that the minor injury in question was an infected cut from a blade of frozen grass planet-side. 

Aloud, Thrawn said nothing, only giving Narwen a pleasant nod and gesturing for the team to take their seats. Faro could tell he intended to speak mostly to Petty Officer Irick; he’d looked over the rest of the team’s service records and qualifications already and decided she was the most useful to him. 

While the rest of the team tugged their chairs closer and crowded around Thrawn’s desk, Irick — one of the lowest-ranking members — tried to sit in the back row. Faro motioned her forward at once, because she could see that Thrawn _wanted_ to, but didn’t wish to expose his raw, unbandaged hands.

“Petty Officer Irick,” said Thrawn at the exact moment that Faro gestured for her, “I’d like for you to sit up front, please. You have the most experience with this language group.”

Narwen and Drodson shared a look that Faro didn’t like _at all_ and scooted their chairs apart so Irick could sit between them. The look didn’t seem to have anything to do with Irick, Faro noticed; they didn’t seem to mind ceding the spotlight to her, and in fact, seemed to expect it. So why…?

 _Let’s be more subtle in the future,_ Thrawn advised her.

Faro shot him a sharp look, but he kept his face placid and his eyes on his datapad.

 _That’s not subtle,_ he said as she watched him. 

_It’s not subtle to stare at a blank datapad, either,_ Faro said. Keeping her face carefully professional, she reached over and turned Thrawn’s datapad on for him, earning a flicker of chagrin and self-deprecating humor from him. He sat back as she called up the linguistics team’s latest data for him, and she was vaguely aware of his eyes flickering up to study the team.

“You may recall my wrists were injured in the temple,” Thrawn said by way of explanation.

He thought his voice sounded warm and conversational right now, Faro noted with some incredulity. Did he _always_ think his voice sounded warm? Because she wasn’t sure it _ever_ did, and it certainly didn’t now.

 _You sound dangerous,_ she informed him. _Like you’re half-assed threatening them._

Thrawn blinked, but his expression otherwise didn’t change. Chief Narwen looked at him warily.

“I remember, sir,” she said. She shifted in her seat, glancing sideways at Lieutenant Drodson. Thrawn looked down at his datapad as Faro pulled up footage from the Kinos. He raised an eyebrow while, onscreen, pillars of mutasteel blocked the Kinos from getting too close to the temple itself. 

Exasperation and muted disappointment waged war in Thrawn, but he kept it all off his face. By the time he spoke, his voice was neutral and calm.

“There are simple ways to disable mutasteel even from a distance,” he said. He glanced first at Chief Narwen, then at Lieutenant Drodson. He suspected they hadn’t thought to disable it; perhaps they weren’t sure how mutasteel was capable of movement, and hadn’t bothered to research the matter. Linguists were known among the Empire for being rather single-mindedly devoted to their area of study; many of them consistently failed PT tests or refused to branch out into other qualifications, as though being a well-rounded Imperial servant were somehow beneath them.

Medical officers were quite the same, Thrawn thought grumpily.

Aloud, he said, “Have you attempted an electromagnetic pulse targeted on the temple?”

Drodson and Narwen looked at each other; Drodson didn’t bother to hide how flummoxed he was.

“We’d never get the ion cannon that close, sir,” he said, clearly mystified.

“No,” said Thrawn patiently, “but you don’t need an ion cannon. You’ll be accompanied by TIE bombers on your next run planet-side; they will be equipped with ion burst grenades. The precise technology behind mutasteel is lost, but the basic facts of engineering remain the same, Lieutenant; mutasteel is not a supernatural substance. We may not know precisely how it releases energy, but we know it consists of an electrically-actuated polymer, and we know that, like all morphable structures, it contains a hydrogen generator. Both can be disabled by an ion blast, at least temporarily. In effect, although there are many unknowns, the solutions are simple.”

“The hydrogen generator,” said Drodson with a falsely-confident nod. “Yes. Of course.”

 _His background is not in engineering,_ Faro reminded Thrawn. _It’s in linguistics._

 _He doesn’t need a background in engineering,_ Thrawn responded. _All he needs to do is read the publicly-available scientific journalism put out by Coruscant. I had it routed to all their datapads days ago._

Faro said nothing, rocking her head from side to side ambivalently.

 _It’s in layman’s terms,_ said Thrawn, exasperated. 

When Faro still didn’t respond, he added, even more exasperated:

_My background is in art history. It’s clear he hasn’t even attempted to read the report, Commodore; there’s no excuse not to try._

This, Faro had to concede.

All this happened in the span of a second or so; outwardly, Thrawn’s eyes were hard but his exasperation was invisible. He nodded calmly at Faro and she flicked through to the next file, relieved that he wasn’t sending any of his exasperation her way — she’d been so busy managing him that no reasonable commanding officer would expect her to simultaneously micro-manage the linguistics team … but Faro hadn’t known a great many reasonable COs in her time, and it still took her by surprise every now and then when Thrawn didn’t jump down her throat over things like this. 

The next file was the Ancient Skimscrip writing from the podium, scanned from Thrawn’s own painstaking handwriting a few days before. He examined it for a moment, his face closed-off, and then glanced up at Petty Officer Irick.

“What can you tell me?” he asked simply. 

His thoughts were whirring so quickly it almost made Faro sick. Irick pulled up the podium’s writing on her own datapad and cleared her throat, but Faro barely heard anything she said. Her skin was prickling, and so was Thrawn’s. Across from them, Irick gave her translation with as much confidence as she could muster; the words were incomplete and halting, with several unavoidable errors.

The translation in Thrawn’s head, however, was crystal clear.

Both of them sat frozen in their seats, their faces blank, their eyes fixed on Irick. 

_You didn’t tell me you could read the podium now,_ said Faro, frustrated.

 _I’ve had other things on my mind,_ Thrawn said, matching her tone. _Namely, re-learning Basic in time for this meeting._

But re-learning Basic evidently hadn’t cost him his fluency in Ancient Skimscrip — or whatever this language was. Thrawn glanced back down at the datapad again, heart pounding as he read the words there as easily as he could read Aurebesh. The only difference Faro saw was that many of the words in Ancient Skimscrip were arranged to be read in multiple different ways by what seemed to be the original author’s design.

 _It who serves as Vessel shall undergo a Great Ascension/Death,_ the podium read. _It who serves as Anchor shall stand/hold firm. As the Blood of the Vessel unfolds/transforms, so the Anchor must retain/rebuild the Mind of the Vessel. As the Vessel holds the temple/ideals in its hands, so the Anchor holds the Vessel in its own._

Carefully, so that the linguistics team couldn’t see, Faro reached over beneath the desk and touched Thrawn’s hand. She sent a wordless question his way and watched the column of his throat shift as he swallowed.

 _The Vessel shall undergo a Great Death,_ the podium said.

“Thank you, Petty Officer Irick,” Thrawn said promptly, though like Faro, he’d only gotten the vaguest gist of what Irick said. He ticked back over her tentative translations of vessel/host/pilot and anchor/caretaker/mate. “You’ve done a great deal of independent research on polysemy in ancient Outer Rim language groups, I see.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Irick. If she noticed how little attention they’d paid to her, she didn’t show it.

 _Should we tell them?_ Faro asked.

A flurry of emotion rose up in Thrawn — uncertainty and reflexive negation, both of which were immediately tamped down with a self-control Faro couldn’t help but admire. He considered their options, and his own innate desire for secrecy, and then presented the pros and cons to her at once.

Chief among the cons was the dark form of Darth Vader.

 _What do you think?_ Thrawn asked. He was genuinely asking for her opinion, Faro realized. She glanced at the linguistics team and hesitated. Like Thrawn, her first and most powerful instinct was to keep his capabilities — like their mental bond — a secret.

She tried to examine her motivations, but they were frustratingly opaque. It was easy enough to see _Thrawn’s_ motivations — she could pick through them in his head as easily as she might sift through data after a survey report. For the first time, she wished he could see into her head the same way she could see into his … at least, temporarily, to sort this specific issue out.

 _Let’s not tell them yet,_ she said.

Thrawn circled her decision doubtfully, but he’d asked for her opinion, so he accepted it and moved on. 

And while Faro was distracted, he faced the team and started his next attack on her sanity.

“I’ll be accompanying you on your next excursion,” Thrawn told the linguistics team calmly. Faro sat up straight in her chair and shot him a beady-eyed look. How the hell did he manage to keep a decision like _that_ from her?

 _You absolutely will not,_ she told him.

Thrawn mentally batted her protests away.

“Aye, sir,” said Lieutenant Drodson uncertainly, glancing between Thrawn and Faro, who made a painful effort to keep her expressions and body language in check. She deliberately smoothed the scowl off her face, replacing it with professional neutrality.

 _the chair,_ Thrawn thought, unable to keep this low-level mantra hidden from her. _thechairthechairthechairthechairthe—_

“Once we’ve disabled the mutasteel,” Thrawn continued, “we’ll be taking a survey team to the planet’s surface once again. You have full discretion, Lieutenant, over which members of your team are involved.”

There was a pause as Thrawn glanced back at his datapad.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” said Faro, since the linguistics team was still sitting. “Petty Officer Irick? A moment, please.”

Irick clasped the edge of her seat and sat awkwardly while the rest of the team stood and shuffled out of the office. Beside Faro, Thrawn stared at his datapad, thinking relentlessly of the chair — and _the Vessel shall undergo a Great Ascension/Death_ — and the “Blood of the Vessel unfolds”—

Thrawn bit down on the inside of his cheek, trying to force these thoughts out of his mind. Pretending not to notice, Faro turned her attention to Irick.

“What do you make of the translation so far?” she asked. 

Irick hesitated, glancing between Faro and Thrawn. There was something about her expression that set Faro on edge and made the hair on her arms stand up — but Thrawn, when she connected with his mind, didn’t seem fazed by it in the slightest. Did he not notice the way Irick was looking at them? Or …?

Or was he used to it? 

Looking closer at Irick, Faro realized that was exactly the issue. Irick was staring at Faro and Thrawn as if they were aliens — outsiders. There was a subtle hint of fear and distrust in her eyes, buried beneath a stronger layer of loyalty and respect. Perhaps she wasn’t aware of her own prejudices; most likely not. And for Thrawn, this wasn’t something worth noting; this was simply how _everyone_ stared at him.

Faro let her breath out in a controlled sigh. When Irick still hesitated to answer, Faro waved a dismissive hand.

“Tell us what resources you need,” she said. “Make a list and send it directly to me; feel free to add more resources as you think of them. I’ll see to it you get what you need.”

Irick’s lips parted, as though there was something she wanted to say or ask, but in the end she only nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

 _The possible translations worry her,_ Thrawn said.

“Dismissed to your supervisor, Petty Officer.”

 _She suspects we know more than we’re letting on,_ Thrawn said. _The possible translation of both ‘anchor’ and ‘vessel’ as ‘caretaker’ concerns her. A caretaker is a revered position on Irick’s home planet, Saxov, but to be a caretaker one must by necessity have a…_

His mind swirled, searching futilely for a Basic word that wouldn’t come to him. With a mild upswell of frustration, Thrawn turned to Faro and said,

_My apologies. I thought I was fluent again._

_What word are you looking for?_ Faro asked. 

_It means, one who is taken care of,_ Thrawn said. _The inverse of caretaker._

Faro looked at him in mild relief and gave him a tiny smile. _You can’t find that word because we don’t have one in Basic,_ she said.

There was a pause. Thrawn blinked at her.

 _A deficiency in your language,_ he said, trying to hide the much-greater-than-Faro’s surge of relief that went through him. Faro smiled.

The smile faded. Thrawn, after studying her face for a moment, slipped his own expression back into neutral and looked away. His thoughts cascaded out of Basic and back into Ancient Skimscrip, becoming opaque to her.

Except for one thing, of course: the irrepressible image that throbbed in the back of his head, making all his other thoughts and emotions vibrate with a sense of need that he couldn’t hide from her. 

The chair.

 _You’re not going back to that planet again,_ said Faro firmly. Thrawn didn’t glance her way; his posture was relaxed, his face closed off. She might have believed he didn’t understand or hear her, if she didn’t know better. _I know as well as you do that your motives are—_ Here she hesitated. _—confused. I will not allow you to endanger yourself again._

For a long moment, Thrawn didn’t respond. When he looked back up at her, his thoughts were still ciphered and locked away.

A half-smile tugged at his lips.

“Stop me, then,” he said.


	10. Chapter 10

When she glanced up from her datapad and caught Thrawn nodding off, she let it slide — especially since he somehow noticed her watching him and shook himself awake a moment later. They worked in silence for a while, with Thrawn pushing the temple out of his mind to focus on the movements of the rest of the 7th Fleet and Faro filtering through reports to figure out which ones he needed to see and which ones she could either handle herself or delegate.

But then, only a few hours after their meeting with the linguistics team, Faro glanced up again and found Thrawn asleep in his chair. 

She watched him, silently noting the lines of exhaustion on his face, which was still pale and drawn. He’d had periods of unconsciousness in the three days since the temple incident, Faro thought, but he hadn’t really had the chance to properly _rest_ — and it showed. She glanced down at his unbandaged, injured hands, and then craned her neck to see his bare feet, which she remembered the medic hadn’t had a chance to look at earlier today.

A routine plan of action formed in her head: Contact the medical team; stand; wake Thrawn; inform him it was time to return to the sick bay.

Her hand was straying to her comlink when she stopped, an insubordinate thought disrupting her plan before it could even start.

 _Stop me, then,_ Thrawn had said.

Three more thoughts, not necessarily related, quickly followed:

  1. As just reviewed, Thrawn’s ankle injuries had not been seen to yet today, and his wrist injuries had not been seen to in several hours;
  2. As just reviewed, Thrawn needed genuine rest;
  3. As earlier noted, Thrawn’s stay in the medical suite had not been ideal thus far. His aides were worse than useless, and some behavior from the medical team had left him wary of the sick bay and worsened his mental state.



Faro chewed these over, thinking hard. She studied Thrawn, examining her thoughts from all angles; his head lolled against his shoulder and he was breathing deeply and evenly. If he'd manipulated her into thinking any of those three thoughts, she couldn't see how, but she also couldn't dismiss the possibility out of hand, especially now that they were at odds over whether he could go planet-side or not. From his mind, she could sense the sleeping, half-dreaming whirl of sensations and images, most of them related to the Chimaera. He was faintly aware of the uncomfortable configuration of the chair against his spine and the cool temperature of the office.

Which meant he wasn’t deeply asleep yet. Faro could fix that.

She let her mind curl around Thrawn’s, seeking out every little string of consciousness and holding it tight until its sluggish energy ebbed and died. She chased away his lingering thoughts of work and the Empire; instead, she found his vague memories of home and edited them, pushing away the unfamiliar names and faces and leaving him with only a few carefully-selected feelings: the security associated with the face of a man who vaguely resembled a younger version of Thrawn; the comfort associated with the same aristocratic-looking woman he’d accidentally shown her earlier today; the solace that came from a garden of light patterns carved into the ice-floor of his family home.

It was difficult to find a good memory of warmth anywhere in Thrawn’s head. His memories of home were sparse and sometimes beautiful, but cold; she saw glimpses of him sleeping alone as a child, shivering beneath his blankets in an unheated room. The only embrace she could find was one she’d seen before — when his father had carried him across the ice to a midwife at the age of five — and that memory was stained by the discomfort of a high fever and the fear of dying. He remembered heat as an unpleasant prickle that set his blood tingling anytime he walked into the climate-controlled walls of his elementary school; he remembered it as the way his clothes clung to him as he worked an outdoors apprenticeship in his youth, overheating and soaking his winter furs with sweat as he helped haul in fibrasteel nets from Rentor's half-frozen sea.

Faro was forced to draw the concept of warmth from her own mind and force it into his. She thought of the way it felt to be held, to share body heat with someone else; she let it flow through her and into Thrawn, overriding his own memories of the cold, letting it relax his muscles and soothe the tension in his mind—

—and when she finished, she saw that finally, he was well and truly asleep. He wouldn’t hear a word she said.

She turned her comlink on.

“Commodore Faro to Commander Nerric,” she said.

There was a slight pause before the Chief Medical Officer answered her, his voice tight and his patience strained. “ _Commodore, I'm glad you called. The Grand Admiral_ —”

“—will be rooming in his aft bridge office for now, in order to complete his duties,” Faro finished for him. She waited for Nerric to process this, noting with a grimace that his voice came out laced with even more frustration.

“ _He hasn’t been cleared for duty._ ”

“Then clear him for LLD,” said Faro. “He doesn’t need to be charging into battle anytime soon, Commander. He just needs clearance to work the bridge. Computers, not blasters.”

She could hear the hiss of static as Nerric placed his hand over the microphone and spoke in a frenzied whisper with whoever else happened to be in the room with him. After a moment of consultation, he took his hand off the mic and said, “ _Aye, ma’am, light limited duty it is,_ ” with a distinct sour note in his voice. “ _Is the Grand Admiral with you?_ ” he asked next.

“Yes,” said Faro. Before Nerric could ask anymore questions, she said, “I need you to send a medic to his office for consultation and treatment, Commander. You’re welcome to come, as well. Bring some bacta lotion, fresh bandages—” Her hesitation was so slight that she was certain Nerric wouldn’t notice. “—and the correct dosage of Somnerol for a man of the Grand Admiral’s height and weight.”

This time, the pause was significantly longer. Faro started to sweat.

“ _Are you giving out prescriptions now, ma’am?_ ” asked Nerric, his voice even and polite.

“I am merely noting,” said Faro with a bite in her voice, “that the admiral has previously been cleared to take Somnerol and that he is in need of it now. His medical record shows you’ve administered it to him in the past to no ill effect. If you object to prescribing it now, I’ll require a full report explaining why.”

She could practically hear Nerric grinding his teeth over the comm. “ _Understood, ma’am. Petty Officer Yon-Durok and I will_ —”

“No,” said Faro sharply. She glanced at Thrawn, making sure he was still asleep. “Bring a medic at least the same size as the Grand Admiral, Commander. Petty Officer Yon-Durok is too small for the task at hand.”

Nerric was silent for a moment. “ _Very well_ ,” he said. “ _Lieutenant Crullen and myself, then. We’ll be there shortly_.”

Faro’s only response was, “Very good. Faro out.” She cut the comm immediately, wincing as she imagined her good working relationship with Nerric circling the drain. She’d be able to repair it soon enough, she supposed; it was just that she couldn’t very well explain her plans over comm. 

Would she be able to repair her relationship with _Thrawn_ , though? She studied his sleeping face and tried to ignore the tight feeling in her gut, like Vader’s armored fist had closed around her stomach and squeezed it into a pulp. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar from the way she’d felt in her enlisted days during the Clone Wars, before the Empire had risen and she’d applied for officer candidacy school. Every battle back then had been accompanied with that same tension in her stomach, that same anxious fluttering of nerves.

She’d put him to sleep against his will, manipulating his mind the same way Jedi were rumored to do. The same way Vader did. Thrawn wouldn’t like that — would hate it, in fact. Anybody would, but Thrawn especially. If she’d been pressed by the Emperor himself to come up with a torture designed to specifically hurt Thrawn, manipulating his mind might very well be the first thing she thought of.

But at the same time, she knew him well enough to know he’d appreciate it, too — the way only he could. He liked being challenged; he enjoyed facing new opponents, especially ones with unforeseen abilities — people who could surprise him, who could raise the stakes. And hadn’t he raised the stakes himself in the first place? He’d issued her a direct challenge: _Stop me, then._ He respected Faro; he expected her to give him a good fight. If he woke up and decided he hated her for doing exactly that, then he was a hypocrite.

And Faro knew for a fact he wasn’t a hypocrite. The tension in her stomach abated somewhat, but didn’t go away entirely, and she couldn’t help but feel like she was deluding herself. She leaned over Thrawn, keying the controls on his hoverchair to bring him through to his quarters. Once there, she busied herself searching for his linens. They weren’t in his closet or the trunk she’d pulled out earlier, and after a few minutes of frustrated searching, Faro began to suspect he didn’t keep any in his aft bridge office at all.

Hands on her hips, she glanced around the room. He didn’t keep the bed made because it dissuaded him from sleeping in his office. Perhaps that applied to keeping linens here, too. With a sigh, she raised her comlink and called down to the laundry, thanking her lucky stars when she got patched through to a droid rather than a living being capable of gossip.

“I need a full set of linens delivered to Grand Admiral Thrawn’s aft bridge office,” she said. “Please also bring a pillow, a pillowcase, and—” She glanced at Thrawn and felt guilt twist inside her. She remembered searching futilely inside his mind for a memory of warmth. “—and three blankets,” she said. 

She didn’t listen to the droid’s response. Instead, she focused on Thrawn’s mind, keeping him in a deep sleep while she waited for either the linens or Commander Nerric to arrive. In the end, both arrived at the same time — the access bell chimed and Faro left Thrawn’s side, opening the door to see Commander Nerric and Lieutenant Crullen vying with a laundry droid to enter first.

“Go make the bed,” said Faro to the droid, indicating Thrawn’s quarters. It zipped past her at once, leaving Nerric and Crullen both looking a little put out. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” Faro said, hoping this would alleviate their bruised egos somewhat. “Come inside.”

They followed her through to Thrawn’s quarters, each of them gawking around at the office with varying degrees of curiosity. Nerric seemed faintly disapproving; Crullen’s mouth had formed an ‘O,' as if he'd never seen a flag officer's quarters before. Actually, Faro rather hoped he hadn't. 

When Faro stepped through the door, she found the droid making Thrawn’s bed with efficient movements while Thrawn, looking half-asleep, held the rest of the linens in his lap and watched it with heavy-lidded eyes. Alarm flared inside her when she saw he was awake. He glanced at her briefly, a mixture of reproach and amusement flickering inside him. 

_I see I’ve been sent to bed without supper,_ he said.

 _It’s what you get for mouthing off,_ Faro replied — but relief overtook alarm when she saw he wasn’t angry with her. A moment later, she realized why. Thrawn seemed almost rueful, and he made no attempt — verbally or physically — to stop the droid from making his bed. As she examined his thoughts, she began to suspect that Thrawn believed he’d fallen asleep naturally. He seemed to have no idea she’d forced unconsciousness upon him. The realization killed her relief and replaced it with an uncomfortable chill that left her feeling off-balance.

Without turning his head to glance at the medical team, Thrawn said, “Good afternoon, Commander. Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Crullen shifted from foot to foot and said nothing.

“Sir,” said Nerric, his voice stiff. “I understand you’re to be put on limited light duty from now on—”

Thrawn’s expression didn’t change, but Faro could hear him mentally processing this information. He turned it over in his head and examined it with great interest.

“—but my warnings about exhaustion and overwork remain the same,” Nerric continued. He came forward, setting his medical case on Thrawn’s bedside table. If he noticed he was in the droid’s way, he didn’t acknowledge it, but Thrawn quietly reversed his hoverchair to give the droid more room so it could work. “As such, I think it’s wise to make this office your quarters, temporarily of course, but I do question the wisdom of staying here without medical caregivers on hand.”

For a moment, Thrawn didn’t respond. The information that he’d be staying in his quarters, not in the hospital, registered with him slowly, like a warm bloom of equal parts relief and disbelief. He looked to Faro for confirmation, his face unreadable but his heart pounding.

She gave a tentative nod, confirming what Nerric had said. The sense of relief inside Thrawn blossomed into a muted sort of joy. 

_You did this?_ he asked her.

Faro hesitated, her guilt over the way she’d forced him to sleep rearing its head again. She nodded once more, but the rush of subsequent gratitude from Thrawn made her feel ten times worse. It took immense effort to keep her face blank, and clearly blankness wasn’t exactly the right choice with Thrawn — he noticed the change at once and she could feel him studying her face, trying to figure out what she was hiding from him. 

Nerric was the one to save her. He shooed the droid away and then turned to Thrawn, gesturing toward the narrow trooper’s cot.

“This will be easier, sir, if you’re lying down,” he said. “I need to examine your wounds.”

Thrawn glanced away from Faro to give Nerric a brief nod. He declined assistance from Lieutenant Crullen, lowering himself onto the bunk without help — and without much pain, so Faro didn’t protest. Nerric pulled the trunk out from underneath Thrawn’s cot and perched on the edge of it, sorting through his medical kit to find a scanner.

“Let’s see those hands,” he said briskly.

Thrawn’s face remained perfectly unreadable as he raised his bloody hands for Nerric to see. Nerric’s mouth spasmed, turning into a dark frown. He glared over his shoulder at Faro.

“I’ve already been scolded by the commodore,” said Thrawn mildly, coming to Faro's rescue — and throwing himself on the pyre as a result. Though, of course, he deserved to be on the pyre for this one, Faro reminded herself. “I am of course willing to endure another scolding from you, though I question the efficiency of a repeat performance.”

Nerric let out a sigh that almost became a groan. He shook his head, jaw clenched. “Just quit making more injuries for yourself, sir,” he requested. “No reason to do the enemy’s work for them.”

 _Well, they’re certainly not doing it,_ Thrawn thought. 

Faro shot him a quelling look, which Thrawn pretended not to see. He held still as Nerric cleaned and examined his wounded fingers, applying bacta to each minor cut and abrasion with a fine-point q-tip. 

“What happened to your bandages?” Nerric asked as he reached for a fresh roll. Crullen handed it to him silently.

“It’s difficult to keep them dry in the shower,” Thrawn said.

“That’s why you’re supposed to shower in sick bay,” said Nerric, making an obvious effort to keep his voice as even as Thrawn’s was. “So the medics can supervise you and change your bandages afterward. If you’re going to work from your aft bridge office now, then you need to call the medical team anytime you plan to remove the bandages.”

Thrawn accepted the admonishment good-naturedly, though privately, Faro could tell he was concerned that Nerric had both believed the lie and also gotten piqued over it.

 _My hair’s not even damp,_ Thrawn noted. He eyed Nerric, whose anger was real, not feigned; Thrawn could tell from his spike in facial heat. _He likes you,_ Thrawn concluded.

 _What?_ said Faro, her shock manifesting as a physical jump.

 _He’s jumped to the wrong conclusion,_ said Thrawn, his amusement intensifying as he studied Nerric’s flushed cheeks. _He sees that my clothes are changed and my hair is dry. He notes that you and I are alone in my living quarters. He thinks_ —

 _Sir,_ Faro protested.

— _and he’s quite jealous about it, too,_ said Thrawn, with a definite air of satisfaction. 

_Well, maybe he’s jealous of me, not you,_ Faro shot back once she recovered. This notion was so ludicrous to Thrawn that it threw him off-balance, and when Nerric finished wrapping his hands and tapped him on the thigh, saying, “Now for the feet,” Thrawn only blinked at him for a moment.

“By God, you’re tired, sir,” Nerric said briskly, misinterpreting Thrawn’s slow response. Thrawn waved him off with a dismissive gesture, sitting still as Nerric examined his ankle wounds. “What’s your pain level?” Nerric asked.

“Undetermined,” said Thrawn.

“You can’t say undetermined every time,” said Nerric impatiently. “Give me a number from one to ten.”

Thrawn’s thoughts centered around the temple, the chair. The concept of pain was too nebulous for him to put his finger on. “Undetermined,” he said again.

“I’d say it’s about a seven,” said Faro.

Both Nerric and Thrawn turned to look at her. Nerric’s eyebrows were raised, but his expression was open and inviting — maybe Thrawn had been right about the jealousy, Faro thought. But Thrawn’s expression was flat, like a warning. 

“A seven?” Nerric prompted.

“From what I’ve seen,” said Faro stiffly, refusing to elaborate further.

“A seven, then,” Nerric said, turning back to Thrawn. Faro wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that he’d trusted her opinion so readily; it seemed to imply a perceived level of intimacy between Faro and Thrawn that wasn’t really there. Nerric tapped Thrawn’s right ankle. “Would that pain level have something to do with the smashing incident?” he asked.

Thrawn didn’t deign to respond. He watched with muted curiosity as Nerric and Crullen saw to his ankles, smearing orange bacta lotion over his wounds and wrapping them again. 

“Is the pain still interfering with your sleep?” Nerric asked, his eyes on the bandages as he worked.

“Yes,” said Faro before Thrawn could respond. He raised his eyebrows at her, but Nerric nodded.

“Any symptoms I should know about?” he asked Thrawn.

This time, neither Thrawn nor Faro answered. She thought about his strange addiction to the chair, the way his thoughts swirled around it nonstop. He thought of the electrical discharge in his hands, the foreign extremity of emotion that had been plaguing him ever since he first woke up in the sick bay. 

Then, of course, there was their mental connection, something Nerric knew nothing about.

“Sir?” Nerric said politely. 

“No further symptoms,” Thrawn said, his voice distant. His eyes drifted for a moment before suddenly making direct contact with Nerric, as though his focus had sharpened. “I will be going planet-side, Commander Nerric, on our next expedition to—”

“You absolutely will _not_ ,” Nerric snapped. Faro felt a vindictive surge of relief; Thrawn’s expression didn’t change. Honestly, if he'd thought Nerric would agree with him, maybe Vanto had been right when he insisted Thrawn was a social dunce. 

“I will of course take your medical opinion under advisement—” Thrawn started.

“My medical _expertise_ , sir, not my _opinion_ ,” Nerric corrected. He rooted through his medical case as he spoke. “And as Chief Medical Officer, I outrank you in all medical affairs. You’re not going planet-side.”

Thrawn’s expression still didn’t change. “Noted,” he said, his voice neutral.

Both Faro and Nerric eyed him, neither of them buying his easy acceptance of the order. Nerric eventually turned his gaze toward his chrono, checking the time even as he removed a bottle of Somnerol from his case. Thrawn’s head tilted to the side as he read the label.

“I didn’t request medication,” he said mildly.

Nerric paused for a moment, but he didn’t argue with Thrawn — nor did he throw Faro under the bus. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and shook a single pill into a disposable cup. “You’ve taken Somnerol before,” he said, his tone gruff and making no allowances for an argument. “And it’s currently two hours into the night cycle. Rest is the most important factor in healing, sir.”

He held the cup out to Thrawn, who examined it but made no move to take it. His eyes flickered to Faro.

 _You planned to drug me?_ he said.

 _You’ve been having trouble sleeping,_ Faro said with a minute shrug.

Thrawn eyed the disposable cup. _I fell asleep without issue earlier,_ he noted. But beneath his reasonable, unbothered tone, there was a spike of something that reminded Faro of her own fight-or-flight response during battle, as if the sight of the pill panicked him. She could feel Thrawn trying to squash his own reaction, arguing wordlessly with his emotional response.

In the end, his eyes flicked up to Nerric.

“You first,” he said, his voice even.

Lieutenant Crullen bit off a gasp of disbelief, like he couldn't even _comprehend_ that a senior officer could be spoken to that way. Nerric’s neutral face turned into a scowl.

“I’m not dosing myself with Somnerol,” he said, voice clipped. “Take the pill or don’t, sir. It’s your choice.”

He set the disposable cup down and tossed the bottle to Faro. Only five pills rattled around inside it. “I’ll trust you with distribution,” he said sourly. “Make sure to take that with water, Admiral. Don’t damage your throat.”

Thrawn replied with an even nod, but Faro could feel the tension he was hiding. He was waiting on tenterhooks for Nerric to leave. Her first thought was that he had something to say to her — something private, perhaps, but also something he didn’t wish to discuss mentally. A closer examination of his mind proved this theory wrong. It was the pills that had set him on edge; he wanted Nerric to leave so he could throw them out.

“You wanted Lieutenant Crullen for something?” Nerric asked Faro as he stood.

“Ah … no,” she said, blinking as she pulled her thoughts away from Thrawn. Nerric had already put his medical case back together and was standing near the door. “No, Commander. Dismissed.”

 _You wanted Crullen to lift me into bed, assuming I was still unconscious when they arrived,_ Thrawn guessed, eyeing Crullen as he left.

Faro waited until both men had exited the room. The door to Thrawn’s office closed behind them on their way out.

“Take the pill, sir,” she said, turning back to Thrawn. “It won’t hurt you, and you’re off-shift anyway. Nerric said you’ve taken Somnerol before.”

“Yes,” said Thrawn, accepting the change of subject with good grace. “But…”

His eyes drifted. His thoughts swirled. For three days straight, his sleep had been shallow or restless — more often, it was not true sleep, but unconsciousness due to stress or pain. His waking moments had been groggy, confused, marred by his new mental bond with Faro and the hypnotic tug of the temple. Faro could see that he craved sleep just as much as he questioned her motivations to help him. He remembered his own words, _Stop me, then,_ with a hint of chagrin — if only because it seemed like Faro was indeed stopping him; he couldn't go planet-side if he was asleep. 

But most importantly, he wanted to be himself again — awake, alert, sharp-minded. And he wouldn’t achieve that if he didn’t sleep. But—

 _Tedind bitgii etgeerie,_ whispered a voice in Thrawn’s head. It was a metallic voice, like the sound of durasteel doors scraping apart from each other. It left a coppery taste in Faro’s mouth. _Edgeer ümüod khordsen._

“Sir?” said Faro cautiously. Thrawn’s eyes had gone glazed, his lips slightly parted; it gave him a distant look that she didn’t like in the slightest. Like a man lost in his memories — and not the good kind. She stepped forward, putting herself directly in his line of sight, and was gratified when his eyes focused on her. 

_Tüind etgoj bolukhgiü,_ the voice said. Thrawn winced, his lower eyelids hitching up slightly as if to protect his eyes. He didn’t look away from Faro; she felt his thoughts swirling around the Somnerol, around her, around Nerric — all coupled together with a feeling she recognized from his memories. A feeling that seemed to be amplified by the metallic voice. A small boy, sick and helpless, carried in his father’s arms across the ice.

“Commodore,” he said evenly, but his voice came out as a labored rasp. Faro leaned forward, hesitated, placed her hands over his. Thrawn’s eyes slipped closed; he leaned into the warmth of her palms against his bandages. 

“Sir,” said Faro, trying not to show how fast and hard her heart was beating as she tried to make sense of the unusual voice in his head, “are you thinking in Ancient Skimscrip? I hear a voice—”

Faintly, Thrawn shook his head. He mouthed the word “Basic,” but no sound escaped his lips. He shifted his hands in her grip, casually guiding her until her fingers touched his bare wrists. Through his mind, Faro felt a blossoming of warmth — foreign and uncomfortable to him — chasing the strange, metallic voice away. 

Thrawn tipped his head back, sinking in a controlled fall until he was lying on his back on the mattress, and Faro went with him, keeping her grip on his wrists the whole time. She had to kneel on the mattress beside him to keep holding his hands; her knee rested firmly against his thigh. 

_Tüind etgoj bolukhgiü,_ the voice said.

“ _V’eostri_ ,” Thrawn murmured, and Faro got the peculiar sense that he was arguing with the voice in his head.

“Sir,” she said, rubbing her thumbs along the bare skin of his wrists. Her spine ached from the awkward position she was in; hesitantly, knowing Thrawn wouldn’t care but feeling strange about it nonetheless, she shifted on the mattress until she was straddling his hips, careful not to let her thighs touch his. “Translate for me,” Faro requested; she could hear a pleading note in her voice that she didn’t like, so she bit her lip and tried to correct it. Her voice came out all wrong as a result, sharp and unfeeling. “Translate for me. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

 _Tüind etgoj bo_ —

Thrawn looked up at her, squinting against the lights. “Don’t trust them,” he said flatly, without emotion. “They’ve poisoned the pills. Don’t trust her.”

A cold hand curled around Faro’s gut. Her grip on Thrawn’s wrists loosened, and she almost let go before she caught herself. “That’s what the voice is saying to you?” she asked, her mouth dry.

Thrawn closed his eyes, huffing quietly. The voice was repeating itself in the background of his mind.

“You make me sound like a mental patient,” he murmured.

Faro said nothing, not sure if he was talking to her or to the voice. She could tell that the voice was so loud in his head he’d stopped hearing his own voice halfway through that sentence, and he had no idea if he’d actually finished it or not. He peered up at her, gauging her reaction.

“Since when do you hear voices?” Faro asked, squeezing his hands in what was meant to be a comforting gesture.

“Sst,” said Thrawn chidingly, giving her hand a reproachful squeeze in return. Belatedly, she remembered his wounds.

“Sorry. But—”

She was going to ask him again. He knew it; she could see his mind tensing in anticipation of the question; she could feel his chest tightening, and there was a sharp sensation in his throat as if spikes had grown from the columns of muscle there to stop his words from getting through. Faro paused, measuring the heights of emotion in Thrawn’s mind. His expression was relaxed and unbothered, but she sensed that if she pushed him — forced him to confront this new change before he’d had time to process it in private—

She remembered what had happened in the sick bay with Petty Officer Yon-Durok. She looked down at Thrawn, saw him studying her, waiting in a swirl of anxiety to see what she would do. 

Faro took a deep breath.

“Voices,” she said. “Totally normal. Let’s table that topic and get back to the pills.”

Thrawn nodded, blinking rapidly. He avoided her eyes.

“You think they’re poisoned?” Faro asked, keeping her voice brusque and businesslike. Not because she thought that was what Thrawn needed from her, exactly — but because she wasn’t sure she could handle doing anything else. If she made her voice soft and gentle, she was certain it would start to shake.

Beneath her, Thrawn shook his head.

“No?” said Faro, not sure whether to believe him.

He shook his head again.

“But you still don’t want to—”

Quietly, Thrawn slipped his hands out of her grasp. He grabbed one of the extra blankets the droid had brought up for him. It was still folded into a neat square, and as Faro watched, Thrawn drew it closer to him and draped it over his face, leaving him much the same way she’d found him in the sick bay earlier that day — like a corpse in repose, with a shroud over its face to hide its open eyes.

 _What is this?_ she asked, touching one corner of the blanket. _You keep doing this whenever you’re upset._

 _Leave it,_ said Thrawn, his mental voice calm and polite. _The lights are too bright._

Faro raised an eyebrow at that, but she drew her hand back from the blanket and grabbed Thrawn’s hand again, touching his wrist lightly. “Lights: scale to zero,” she said aloud. The lights dimmed slowly, giving her time to adjust. Thrawn didn’t remove the folded blanket from his eyes.

 _So you don’t think the pills are poisoned?_ Faro asked.

 _Absolutely not,_ said Thrawn. _Neither you nor Nerric have any reason to poison me._

Faro considered this, probing Thrawn’s mind to see if he was telling the truth. Intellectually, it seemed he was; emotionally, Faro was less sure. She studied him for a moment, his relaxed posture at odds with what she could see from his mind.

“Rukh?” she called.

Thrawn went still beneath her in surprise, but didn’t protest. When the door to his quarters opened a moment later, he turned his head slightly, as if he could see Rukh’s heat signature even with the blanket folded over his face. Rukh paused in the doorway, his alien face betraying no surprise at what he saw.

“Can you smell these capsules for the Grand Admiral?” Faro asked, keeping her voice and posture professional, as if she weren’t straddling Thrawn’s waist while he lay in pajamas on his bed. She tossed the bottle to Rukh and indicated the disposable cup on the trunk; Rukh cast her a beady eye before obeying. He unscrewed the bottle and held it to his nose, inhaling deeply, then picked up the disposable cup and sniffed it, too.

Faro watched as Rukh paused, considering the data. He stepped forward and reached for Thrawn’s hand, and Faro released it at once, allowing Rukh to take Thrawn’s wrist and feel for his pulse. 

“Untampered with, Master,” he said. 

Thrawn didn’t respond. From his mind, Faro sensed an unwillingness to speak aloud. 

“Thank you, Rukh,” she said on his behalf, though it only earned her another strange glare, this one laced with what looked like amusement and contempt. She hesitated, struggling to interpret Rukh's expression, and then dismissed it. Rukh, she suspected, would always be a mystery to her. “Would you be willing to sample one?” she asked him.

 _No,_ said Thrawn at the same moment that Rukh stiffened as if Faro had insulted his maitrakh. _He won’t consent to be drugged. It’s his duty to protect me._

“Ah, never mind, Rukh,” Faro said. She glanced down at Thrawn, then at Rukh, weighing her options. “What if I—”

 _Each capsule is engineered for a male Chiss standing two meters tall and outweighing you by more than twenty kilograms,_ said Thrawn, his distress fading instantly and replaced by irritated disbelief. _You are not going to damage your internal organs to assuage an irrational fear of poisoning implanted in my head by_ —

He cut himself off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Thoughts of nefarious sentient technology morphed into thoughts of less-fantastical mental illness, and the sentence in his head faded and died. Faro blinked down at him, unsure what to say. Briefly, a memory swam to Thrawn's mind — a teenage boy leaning over him, red eyes flickering over a much-younger Thrawn's face with feigned coldness and poorly-hidden concern. Thrawn banished this memory at once. 

“But sir—” Faro started.

Thrawn dragged the blanket off his face in exasperation and grabbed the disposable cup from Rukh in one smooth movement. He shot back the pill without water, put the blanket back over his face, and settled down again.

Rukh shot an accusatory look Faro’s way, as if Thrawn taking a sleeping pill was somehow the worst outcome in the galaxy. She gave him an indignant look back.

“You are unpoisoned, Master,” Rukh assured Thrawn.

“I know,” said Thrawn, his voice muffled by the blanket and blatantly irritated. “Thank you for your assistance, Rukh. Go stand guard.”

Faro watched him leave. When the door hissed shut behind him, she turned and faced Thrawn again, studying his mind since she couldn’t see his face.

 _I have twenty minutes until it kicks in,_ said Thrawn, his tone and emotions so muted now that they were unreadable. Faro was still clasping his wrist as he moved his hand down, finding her thigh. Her pulse jumped at first, interpreting the gesture all wrong, but all he did was lightly tap her until she got the point and slid off him.

 _What are you going to do?_ she asked as he sat up, removing the blanket from his face and angling his head away from her. Thrawn shot her a wave of wordless exasperation and embarrassment as he stood; he leaned heavily on the hoverchair.

 _Go cancel my meetings for the next six hours,_ he said instead of answering her. But he didn’t need to answer her; Faro realized with chagrin that he was heading for the fresher. 

_Do you need help_ —

Thrawn waved her off, his sense of embarrassment spiking. Faro pulled down the barricade between them in response and stayed in the bedroom with Thrawn’s datapad, busying herself with the simple task he had set for her. She accessed his schedule, canceling his meetings for the next twelve hours instead of just six, as she was certain the drugs would last longer than that. 

She could hear the shower running on the other side of the office, but only for five minutes or so. When the noise ended, she checked on Thrawn again, lifting the barricade just enough to catch him brushing his teeth. He pushed her away with a mild surge of irritation, but it was sluggish instead of sharp, and Faro guessed the drug was working on him quicker than he thought.

She set his datapad aside, crossing from his bedroom to the fresher in quiet, cautious steps. She stationed herself just outside the fresher door; she could feel Thrawn struggling to keep his arm up as he brushed his teeth. His eyelids drooped, his head tipping forward. He had to lean forward on the sink and rest all his weight on his elbows so he could spit the toothpaste out of his mouth.

 _Okay,_ Faro said, hitting the door release. _You need help._

Thrawn didn’t argue. He leaned heavily on her as she entered the fresher, and by the time she got him to the hoverchair, he was already asleep. Rukh came forward silently to help her maneuver Thrawn into bed, both of them mindful of his wounds. Guilt and defensiveness mingled in Faro’s chest as she aligned Thrawn’s legs and pulled down the cuffs of his pants where they’d ridden up on his shins.

“You’ll watch over him while he sleeps?” she asked Rukh. She knew it was a stupid question, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking, and to his credit, Rukh responded with a grave nod and no hint of condescension. “I’ll be on the bridge,” Faro explained. She folded Thrawn’s arms over his stomach and then reached for the blankets, her hand brushing something hard as it passed over his thigh.

Faro paused, recognizing the feeling of plastoid even through the fabric of Thrawn’s pants. She looked down at his sleeping form, his eyelashes brushing his cheekbones, his face relaxed. 

There was something in his pocket, and Faro had a sneaking suspicion that she knew what it was. She glanced at Rukh and caught him watching her without expression; he gave no sign of approval or disapproval as she reached into Thrawn’s pocket and pulled out his comlink.

Rukh avoided her eyes.

“You gave him this?” said Faro in disbelief. She turned the comlink over in her hands. “When? When you handed him the pills?”

Rukh refused to answer; he seemed to think she had no right to question him, and perhaps she didn’t. Faro looked down at Thrawn again, tracking back over the last hour or so in disbelief. She remembered the way he’d projected embarrassment at her while heading to the refresher, persuading her to pull the barricade down of her own free will — and leaving him with the privacy and sound-proofing needed to contact someone without Faro hearing.

A move like that wouldn’t have worked on her, normally. But the distress she’d felt from him earlier — the panic over the sleeping pills and the metallic voice in his head — had worked on Faro’s sympathy for him, making her less likely to question him over something so small as using the fresher without supervision. She squeezed the comlink in her hand, pressed the callback button, and discovered its history and contacts had been wiped.

“Lights on,” said Faro, her voice clipped. The lights flared to life overhead; when she leaned closer to Thrawn, she could detect no sign of tears on his face. The blanket he’d used to cover his eyes earlier was dry to the touch; he’d been faking an emotional response — even with their mental connection — for at least twenty minutes, then, and there was no evidence to say he hadn’t been faking it longer. Just as there was no evidence to say he hadn’t been using _real_ emotional responses to manipulate her, weaponizing genuine mood swings to get his way. She remembered how he'd thought of that childhood near-death experience earlier, when the Somnerol was first brought into play; had he summoned up that childhood memory on purpose? Focused so thoroughly on what he remembered from that day that Faro, peering into his mind, had mistaken it for his current mental state?

With a deep breath, she delved into Thrawn's unconscious mind, trying to find the memory of who he'd contacted, what plan he'd set into motion while he was supposedly using the fresher. But memories of the comlink eluded her; what swam to the surface instead was the same memory from earlier — a teenage Chiss boy leaning over Thrawn when he was just a small child. Only, as Faro watched this memory, the poorly-concealed concern she'd noted earlier gave way to irritation and the teenage boy leaned back, making an inhuman hissing sound between his teeth.

 _You're faking it,_ he said in disgust, his words filtered into Basic through Thrawn's mind. The child version of Thrawn stopped crying at once, his face taking on an eerie dignity as he wiped his tears and sat up in bed. He caught his school uniform deftly when his older brother threw it at his face. _Someday,_ the boy said to Thrawn, _you'll be genuinely upset over something and no one will believe you because of moments like this. Then you'll regret it._

 _I'm never upset,_ Thrawn said calmly. He couldn't have been older than seven; the memory faded as he admitted defeat and pulled the school uniform on.

Faro glanced at Rukh again just in time to catch a smug smile on his face.

"Oh, you bastard," she said to Thrawn. Her voice did nothing to penetrate the drugged, dreamless haze that his mind had become. "What the hell did you do now?"


	11. Chapter 11

For nearly a week, Thrawn was _manageable_. It was almost like the old Grand Admiral was back — courteous, closed-off, only occasionally confusing. He gave Faro no trouble, cooperated with the medics when they checked on him, and maintained his typical degree of competence from his aft bridge office— 

—and that was _all_ Faro could say on his behalf.

 _I’m attempting to pull a barricade down between our minds,_ he informed her one day while she was working on the bridge.

Faro paused, her verbal response to Pyrondi interrupted. After a moment, and with some difficulty, she managed to finish her sentence and respond to Thrawn at the same time. 

_Why are you trying to do that?_ she asked.

 _Privacy,_ he said. 

She thought of his promise to go planet-side and investigate the temple again, of the growing restlessness she’d sensed from him every time he read through the linguists’ and survey team’s reports. 

_Privacy for what?_ she asked, unable to keep a hint of suspicion out of her voice.

 _Every sentient being has a right to privacy,_ he said mildly, and the next moment — the timing _must_ have been deliberate — Faro was flinching back from a familiar image that flashed in front of her eyes: Thrawn with his head between a Chiss woman’s legs, his lips on her thigh, his hands—

 _You’re trying to tell me you want privacy to—_ Faro started incredulously, and then found she couldn’t finish the sentence, even in her exasperation. 

_To ask that question is in and of itself a breach of privacy,_ said Thrawn, which was just _so_ characteristic of him these days.

 _Well, practice the barricade all you want, sir,_ Faro said. _I can’t stop you. But don’t think for a second that I buy—_

Whatever he did, it turned the rest of Faro’s sentence into a gently-drifting spray of dust in the channel between them; no intelligible words made it through. It was like he’d turned their link into an engine intake, slicing her words into tiny particles and rendering them incoherent. It wasn’t a perfect fix, though, Faro noticed — through the cloud of dust, she could still sense _his_ thoughts and emotions, even if he’d successfully blocked hers.

Intense concentration. Exhaustion. Chest aching, heart racing—

With a surge of concern, Faro found the mental latticework he’d put up between them and swept it away.

 _That’s enough,_ she said, and for a moment she saw Thrawn’s thoughts so vividly that it was like she’d stepped into his body. She could feel how the tension went out of his muscles against his will and he slumped back in his chair, cold sweat making his pajamas stick to his skin. But where other people might react to this failure with frustration — might even lash out — Thrawn was already assessing the data with a glimmer of self-satisfaction, finding the flaws in his latticework, considering other structures that might last longer, work better.

Faro sent a sense of weary resignation his way. She could feel him gathering his strength, but a quick assessment of his own stamina put any immediate repeats of the experiment on delay. 

For now.

Thirteen hours later, Faro was just starting to drift off to sleep. Thrawn’s presence flickered at the back of her mind, distant and easily ignored. She had the vague sense that he was in the shower, could focus on the warmth of water against his skin to help herself relax; as she dozed, his shower-thoughts mingled with her sleep-thoughts, creating a wave of ship-related nonsense that spiraled together with memories of home, old jokes, something Pyrondi had said at midday that stuck in her brain and, most annoyingly, every bit of it was set to the cadence of a half-forgotten jingle Faro had known as a child.

She was almost asleep when a flick of irritation broke through her thoughts and, a moment later, she could no longer feel the spray of the shower against Thrawn’s skin. Faro opened her eyes; in the space of a single blink, she realized the sense of loss ran deeper than that. She hadn’t realized until now how fully her dozing mind had intertwined with Thrawn’s, and now it felt like more than half of her thoughts had suddenly been ripped away.

She reached out to him tentatively; in their connection, there was an alien structure, something like a finely-woven net. When she touched it — or _imagined_ herself touching it — a web of blue static met her fingers and pushed her insistently away.

 _Thrawn?_ said Faro warily, drawing her hand back. She peered through the mesh of the net, caught glimpses of his mood and thoughts, a snippet of his voice:

— _finally concentrate_ —

 _Concentrate on what?_ said Faro indignantly, forcing her mental voice through the mesh. _For the past half hour, you’ve just been compiling a list in your head of Mid Rim art galleries you want to visit and which cultural studies you want to view during your free time._

—his hand, broad and warm and covered in suds, slipping over the hard planes of his abdomen to his—

Faro blinked, and in that brief moment where her eyes were closed, the hole in the mesh seemed to knit itself together, leaving her no view to the other side. She pulled back, cheeks flushed, feeling strangely flustered; had he given her that glimpse on purpose, knowing it would embarrass her? She circled this thought for longer than she'd like to admit, mortified by the implication, then forced it out of her mind. He was _showering_. It stood to reason that she'd catch him soaping up; it didn't have anything to do with her. 

Mentally, she paced the corridor between their minds, looking for the net’s mooring points. Here, the blue static seemed to fizzle and die; when she crouched down, examining the points closer, she found knots of memories and sensations deemed insignificant: a thousand memories of Thrawn trying to sleep, in narrow military cots or in hard-backed shuttle seats; what seemed like millions of memories, almost identical, of long midnight runs and intense sparring sessions, each one broken down to the thoughtless sensations of sweat and gasping breaths and straining muscles.

Faro paused, flicking her chin to the right in an effort to get her hair out of her eyes — she realized a moment later that her hair wasn’t in her eyes at all, that the sensation of disheveled hair, sweat dripping from the ends of it and running down her nose, had come from Thrawn. From the knots of memory keeping the net together.

 _Alright, you bastard,_ Faro thought. She sunk her mind deep into the knot; with a wrench of strength that sent an immediate stab of pain through her temples, she sorted the memories into categories: _Sleep_ tossed northward, _Exercise_ southward, _Daily Meals_ eastward, _Mindless Cleaning_ to the west. 

Only one memory stayed behind, clinging desperately to the fibers of the net. A young Thrawn, perhaps no older than six, was breathing harshly, struggling to wield an adult-sized snow vaporator in temperatures that made Faro shiver just thinking about them. She called this memory closer to her, infused it with warmth, watched the foreign concept slowly tear the memory apart. The background melted, colors swirling into one big off-white stain; the scenery faded away.

The sense of heat ate up Thrawn’s mental image of himself last, and when that was gone, Faro stepped back and watched the net fall away, too. Down the corridor of her mind, she could see Thrawn’s thoughts again — a half-distracted acknowledgement of what she’d done, devoid of emotion as he scrubbed shampoo from his hair. 

_Well done,_ he said absently. He glanced down the connection at her the same way a blind man might turn his eyes in the direction of someone who’s recently spoken. _But I would appreciate some privacy at the moment, Commodore,_ he said, voice mild. _If you don't mind._

There was no discernible rancor that she’d torn through his latest attempt at a mental barrier, and that knowledge had a direct dampening effect on Faro’s sense of victory. Feeling peculiarly ashamed, she pulled the barricade down of her own accord and left Thrawn to his shower.

Alone in her bed, without Thrawn’s background thoughts to soothe her, Faro stared up at the ceiling. She thought about the mindless memories she’d discovered mooring his net to the corridor walls — was that how the structure looked in _his_ mind, too? Was he projecting his image of it to her, forcing her to visualize it the same way he did? If so, could she perhaps get past it simply by changing her mental image of it against his will?

Her mind ticked back to the knots. Thrawn's memories of insomnia blurred together with almost frenetic cleaning sessions, the burn of tired eyes becoming the strain of overworked muscles a moment later as the scene morphed from his bed to his office to the dojo. These weren’t neutral memories at all, Faro thought with a frown; they were memories of anticipation, anxiety, restlessness, each one tinged with the echo of concerns he’d put aside in favor of more recent missions, more recent failures and fresh wounds. They weren’t the types of memories you used to keep an enemy at bay. If he wanted to protect his thoughts — his vulnerabilities — then he hadn’t succeeded; he’d only offered her a muted version of the same: glimpses of the things that kept him up at night.

Then again, she _wasn’t_ his enemy. She was his second in command, his — Faro thought of the temple with a grimace — his _anchor_.

These were memories he trusted her with; memories he didn’t hesitate to share.

...and if her heart was warmed by that realization, it _definitely_ meant he was trying to manipulate her again. Faro wrenched the barricade back down and, on the other side of the Chimaera, Thrawn stumbled in the shower and snapped a towel over his waist with a surge of indignation — the mental equivalent of a yelp.

 _What are you up to?_ Faro demanded. 

Thrawn recovered himself quickly and with a flick of irritation; he leaned heavily against the shower wall, taking some weight off his injured ankles. He’d landed a little too hard on the left one when he’d stumbled. _Perhaps next time I’ll be more specific with my requests for privacy,_ he said, struggling to knot the towel over his hip. _Five minutes, Commodore._

Faro watched him give up on the knot, his injured fingers refusing to cooperate; he settled for clasping the towel loosely in one hand as he stepped out of the shower instead. A deep ache set into his fingers, the tendons seizing up from just this minor task. Already, the soothing effects of the shower were fading. 

_You’re up to something,_ Faro said. 

Thrawn looked from the towel around his waist to the one still hanging on the rack, his mind ticking over the mechanics of drying off without exposing himself. He debated calling Rukh in, dismissed it a moment later with a quashed sense of shame — though whether this was because he couldn’t handle a simple task by himself or because he would be calling Rukh away from more important duties, Faro couldn’t tell. She felt his mind flip over in a mental shrug a moment later as he deemed the task too difficult for his current energy level.

 _Don’t look,_ he advised.

With some difficulty, Faro kept her eyes above his waist. Not like there wasn’t plenty to look at there anyway; her gaze somehow got fixed on the beads of water clinging to the hard, defined muscles of his chest and stomach — and she only managed to tear her eyes away when Thrawn started drying his hair, and suddenly his biceps were on full display. 

_Why do you think I’m up to something?_ Thrawn asked. His thoughts swirled tellingly around Rukh, the temple, the bit of deceit he’d pulled in the fresher last week.

 _That little bit of manipulation you pulled with the web_ , said Faro. Back in her room, she crossed her arms, the simple physicality of that motion seeming dream-like and far away. Thrawn paused, the towel slipping down to hang over his shoulders; she could see his frown and feel the low hum of his thoughts as he raced back over the structure of the net.

 _The electric discharge,_ he said. _Yes. But it didn’t deter you for long._

Faro frowned, realizing belatedly that, in some small part of her brain, the blue static _had_ manipulated her; it had reminded her of Thrawn’s electric discharge, ignited a certain amount of caution and anxiety — and led her away from the net entirely. 

_Yes,_ she said. _But that’s not what I meant. I meant the knots of memory you used to moor the net in place._

Thrawn finished drying and tossed the towel down the laundry chute; to Faro’s chagrin, it didn’t look like he’d brought a change of clothes into the fresher with him. 

_The memories were inconsequential,_ he said. He used his elbow to open the medicine cabinet, and Faro saw at once that he’d replaced his toothbrush with the easier-to-use strips of dissolving cleanser that were typically used in the field. Exhaustion was blackening the edges of his mind as he set it between his teeth and bit down.

The taste of mint flooded Faro’s mouth. Thrawn's nose twitched in disgust; evidently, he wasn't a fan of mint. 

_As you can see,_ Thrawn said, pushing away from the counter after he'd rinsed out his mouth, _I’m not up to anything other than basic hygiene._ He made his way out of the fresher and through his aft bridge office, keeping to the wall for support. _You’re welcome to watch me fall asleep, if it will put your mind at ease,_ he said, entering his sleeping quarters. _It won’t take long._

A dark tone accompanied those words. His vision wavered, brought back with intense clarity by a shock of pain as he groped for his dresser and banged his wrist against the drawer. Neither Thrawn’s expressions nor his emotions changed as he pawed through the contents and came back with a pair of undershorts. Preoccupied with his exhaustion, he forgot to warn Faro to look away as he pulled them on.

 _So you really did just want privacy?_ said Faro, a note of skepticism accompanying her thoughts. Much as it pained her, she kept her gaze trained on the ceiling. 

Thrawn stood in his quarters for a moment, hands on his hips, staring with furrowed eyebrows at nothing in particular. Faro couldn’t follow the trend of his thoughts; they were moving too quickly and with too much opacity for her to break through. She could feel the slight chill of his skin, the discomfort of his still-damp hair, but couldn’t see anything past the most basic sensations.

 _Sir?_ she said.

 _I have been accused,_ said Thrawn finally, his voice far away, _of lacking modesty._

Faro thought of and dismissed a dozen different replies.

 _It isn’t true,_ Thrawn continued. 

She could sense him starting and abandoning a dozen different follow-up sentences just like she had a moment before. _Humans seem to believe_ — _I am a firm believer in_ — _if I cannot_ — and most intriguing of all, _Even nonhumans have certain_ —

Each one of them was waved away before it could form.

 _I see,_ Faro said. She watched the darkness creep up on Thrawn’s mind; the slight chill had intensified, bringing the pain from his wrists and ankles up another notch as well. She watched him sway on his feet. It wasn’t quite enough to worry her — she could see his knowledge of his own body, knew he’d endured exhaustion worse than this, knew even more importantly that he was confident he could make it to his bed — but it did make her draw away a little.

His eyes slid closed. The chair flashed bright behind his eyelids, like a beacon drawing him in for a chase. 

_You’re entitled to your privacy,_ Faro wanted to say, but the memory of the chair throbbed behind his temples like a headache, and she could taste the iron memory of mutasteel on his tongue, and she couldn’t force herself to say it. Thrawn, she told herself, wouldn’t allow her any privacy either, if their situations were reversed.

And even if he would, the Chimaera couldn’t afford to have its CO compromised.

 _Get to bed,_ said Faro, gently steering Thrawn’s mind toward the bedside table, where his nightly dose lay waiting in a paper cup. She squashed all feelings of guilt as he swallowed it dry; by the time he’d arranged himself on the thin mattress, arms folded beneath his head and eyes trained on the ceiling, Thrawn’s neural pathways were already disconnecting, eaten up by exhaustion and the threat of drugged sleep.

Ten minutes ticked by before the sedative kicked in a great deal faster than it was supposed to. His thoughts sped up, whirling faster and faster, as if he was trying to squeeze everything he could into the last few seconds of coherence left to him. His cerebellum gave into darkness, muscles turning heavy and immovable against his will; a sensation flared up in his chest, almost like a wave of heat consuming his lungs, making it difficult to breathe. Gravity seemed to spin around him as his balance went out.

 _Relax,_ said Faro, watching the drug take hold.

The right hemisphere broke down. The images he’d summoned up from his art collection suddenly went black, and with them went the soothing effect they’d had. He lost track of the rhythm of his thoughts. The pain in his chest wasn’t going away; it was constricting, getting worse. The bundle of fibers connecting his right hemisphere to his left died down by degrees, like optics sizzling out after a power surge. 

Thrawn blinked up at the ceiling, his breathing labored. His thoughts crowded together, a loud and cryptic jumble at the center of his mind. He could feel unconsciousness creeping up on him, knew he only had moments.

 _Don’t go,_ he said, against his will.

 _I won’t_ — Faro started, but the drug had already taken hold. Thrawn was asleep. 

It seemed too quiet. Too peaceful. She watched the low-light fluctuations of his mind, every sensation and flicker of life too dim to make out. She could see the drug taking root over his brain like a black mold, sinking deep into his neural pathways, enjoying its territory until morning came and those roots began to decompose.

She could see something else, too. Could almost taste it. When she leaned closer — when she embraced Thrawn’s mind so thoroughly she felt the weight of his sedative against her own limbs — she could almost hear it, the way one almost hears a whisper in the night from time to time and chalks it up to imagination, a lingering memory of the day.

A harsh voice, like metal scraping against metal. Its words were indistinguishable; it sounded like bending durasteel; like safety doors slamming down against the deck; like the shriek of a TIE fighter colliding with a spaceport, solar panels tearing off at the roots.

The temple.

The chair.

Inside her quarters, Faro sat up, heart pounding, chest tight. She released her breath in a controlled sigh.

She wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.


	12. Chapter 12

At 9:46 a.m., Faro eased open the mental connection between herself and Thrawn. Her eyes were on her datapad, studying the list of personnel approved to travel planetside; the TIE pilots were ready for launch, all five of them thoroughly prepped on ion technology and more than ready to freeze the mutasteel so the linguist team and their helpers could take a closer look at the temple below.

Thrawn sensed her presence the moment she reached out to him and paused in the middle of an ab crunch — one of the few exercises he could still do without causing himself pain. He swung up into a sitting position, head cocked, waiting for her to speak.

Faro said nothing. A quick survey of his mind showed dubious plans for the next hour — if he seriously thought he could do push-ups or even isometric exercise without fainting, he was in for a rude awakening — but there was nothing about the shuttle.

There should be _something_ about the shuttle, she thought, pulling away. He was hiding it from her somehow — burying it behind his mundane thoughts of maintaining his strength and the training exercises he had planned for the TIE pilots while they were out.

At 10 a.m., she checked in on him again, found him gritting his teeth through the pain in his ankles as he held a plank position, elbows on the floor, his wrists granted a brief reprieve. His temples throbbed, his headache sharp enough to be blinding, even to Faro.

Was he using the pain to keep her at bay? To obfuscate his plans? Because he _was_ planning something, there was no doubt about it. He’d promised to go planet-side whether she liked it or not, and Thrawn didn’t make empty threats.

Faro retreated, gave herself a moment to breathe, then plummeted back in. Thrawn held his position, pretending not to notice her as she went to work, seeking out the pathways taken to send signals of pain back and forth from his nerve endings to his brain. She didn’t shut them down — not exactly; couldn’t even imagine trying to deal with a Thrawn who couldn’t feel pain — but she did _distract_ them, touching each one and projecting feelings of comfort and calm. The throbbing dulled, but didn’t quite fade away.

Thrawn’s mind surged toward her as he noticed the difference. A moment later, without pausing for thought, he pushed off his elbows and started in on a round of push-ups, determined to make the most out of this respite while he still could.

_Push-ups._

With _holes_ in his wrists.

Exasperated, Faro pulled back from his nerve endings and let the pain flood back in; she hadn’t seen any plans worth noting, anyway. She retreated back to the bridge just as Thrawn’s arms spasmed and he rolled over onto his shoulder, hitting the ground hard.

The minutes ticked by. At 10:30, the shuttle would take off accompanied by TIE fighters. Everything seemed to be going suspiciously well; the shuttle passed its final inspection without issue, which only served to ratchet Faro’s tension up another notch. 

At 10:14, Faro turned to Hammerly and said, “Can I get a sensor display—”

 _I suppose I deserved that,_ Thrawn said, flashing her a sense-memory of his twinging shoulder.

“—to my datapad?” Faro finished. She heard her voice falter mid-sentence, barely noticed the readings flickering to life on her screen. Her eyes narrowed. Thrawn scarcely ever reached out to her of his own volition; his tone was self-reproach and dark humor, nothing alarming, nothing of note.

Except that he was responding to Faro’s abandonment of him fourteen minutes late, and he was saying _nothing of note_. Thrawn never spoke for no reason.

 _Sir—_ Faro started, and that was when Thrawn, for the first time ever, successfully pulled a barricade down between Faro’s mind and his. 

The bridge seemed ten times quieter now, like all sound had faded and left Faro abruptly stranded with nothing but the rush of her own heartbeat in her ears; the ever-present background noise of Thrawn’s mind was gone. Faro stared at her datapad, not processing the images she saw; chatter from the crew pits seemed to swell around her and then fade again, leaving her feeling muted and strangely cold.

 _Thrawn?_ she said, her grip on the datapad tightening.

There was no answer. Inside the corridor between their minds, there was no obstruction, no net or engine intake like she’d seen before — instead, there was a massive gap, a black shadow that ate away the floor and walls between her mind and Thrawn’s. It was like the connection had been shattered, ceased to exist.

And — Faro checked her chrono — it was ten minutes before the shuttle was set to take off.

 _Stop me, then,_ Thrawn had said. 

“Oh, hell no,” Faro muttered. She tossed her datapad Hammerly’s way and turned on her heel, heard a clatter of plastic on steel as Hammerly fumbled the catch. “You have the bridge,” she barked, cutting off Hammerly’s questions before they could begin. By the time she reached the bridge entryway, she was moving at a jog, her comlink held to her lips.

“Xoxtin, status on that shuttle,” she said. She barreled through a knot of chatting crewmembers, slid into the turbolift just as its doors began to close and scanned her code cylinder, overriding the paths set into it by her fellow passengers. There was an outraged cry from the men gathered around her as she programmed the lift for the hangar bay instead.

“ _All systems go_ ,” said Xoxtin. “ _Ready for departure._ ”

“Belay that,” said Faro, her voice tight. “Hold the shuttle until I get there. Do _not_ let any of them leave, do you hear me? Not the shuttle _or_ the TIE fighters, and certainly not—”

She caught herself, a cold flush trickling into her stomach. She was hyper-cognizant of the crew members sharing the turbolift with her, of the possible consequences if she finished that sentence the way she wanted to: _certainly not Grand Admiral Thrawn._ Heart thudding, Faro shifted her thumb to the comlink’s controls and toggled her mic off, leaving the sentence unfinished. 

Two paths stretched out before her: tell Xoxtin to detain Grand Admiral Thrawn, and she could keep him safe from the temple — but then it would be only a matter of time before the entire crew knew that their commanding officer wasn’t well — that his orders couldn’t be trusted. And that wasn’t an impression Faro wanted to give, especially when she herself wasn’t sure it was true. Say nothing to Xoxtin, on the other hand, and she ran the risk of Thrawn countermanding her orders, making it out of the hangar bay before she could reach him — going right back to the temple, right back to the mutasteel that had left him injured and changed.

She bit her lip. What it came down to was this: was she willing to risk Thrawn’s life just to preserve his command? 

The turbolift came to a halt before she could decide. Faro welcomed the hiss of the doors opening, grateful for an excuse to get moving, to put her thoughts on the backburner. She wound her way through groups of hangar techs and troopers, keeping her eyes peeled for the shuttle — and for anyone lurking about who might happen to have blue skin. She eyed the stormtroopers as she passed, on the lookout for anyone whose white-on-white patch didn’t quite match up with their posture or pace, but there were too many of them, and even their own commanders would have a difficult time noticing if Thrawn had somehow snuck into the unit.

Halfway to the shuttle, the sounds of the hangar faded, the sizzle of the shield becoming background noise. Faro felt an odd sensation, like she was taking a deep breath with two sets of lungs.

Thrawn’s barricade had fallen.

“You _bastard_ ,” said Faro, hissing the words aloud before she could stop herself. A hangar technician looked over his shoulder at her as she passed, his eyes wide and hurt; she didn’t stop long enough for a full apology. She grasped hold of the connection, wrenching Thrawn’s mind closer to her, determined to find where he was hiding before he could slip away—

—and found him supine on his office floor, his breathing harsh and shallow, his clothes clinging to his skin and soaked with sweat. His eyes were closed, the overhead lights driving his headache to unbearable levels; his wrists were curled against his chest, pain radiating from them in a black haze that tugged at his consciousness, threatened to pull him away from Faro when she’d only just gotten him back.

Her step faltered. Her breathing slowed. Ahead of her, she could see Xoxtin outside the shuttle, watching Faro’s approach with her head cocked.

If Thrawn was still in his office…

Faro picked up the pace again, sending Thrawn a wordless wave of question marks imbued with concern. He batted it all away and summoned all his strength just to roll to his side, giving her a glimpse of Rukh’s heat signature on the far side of the room. He wasn’t alone, then; he had someone to call the medics on his behalf if things took a turn for the worse.

And he hadn’t sent Rukh to the hangar in his stead.

By the time Faro reached the shuttle, her pace was measured and dignified, her features set in an unintentional frown of disapproval. She scanned the personnel lined up outside — selected members of the linguist team, a handful of capable volunteers, the pilot and co-pilot. If Thrawn wasn’t sneaking down to the planet himself, then he had to be sending someone in his place; the timing of his barricade wasn’t a coincidence, not after he’d all but promised to defy her. 

But if he wasn’t sending Rukh…

Faro’s eyes tracked down the line, landing on one person square in the middle. Chief Narwen stared back at her, eyes flat, face expressionless. 

Thrawn had seen her in the sick bay, he’d told Faro last week. Seeking treatment for an infected wound caused by a frozen blade of grass outside the temple. And Narwen, Faro remembered now, was the only person who hadn’t been _assigned_ to the shuttle today; she’d volunteered.

“Chief Narwen,” said Faro, a chill racing up her spine, “with me.”

The others shuffled, glancing at each other first and then at their chronos. When Narwen reached Faro’s side, she turned to Xoxtin and gave her a go-ahead gesture, watched the personnel load back aboard the shuttle herself. Inside the troop transport, they tightened their harnesses, trying not to stare at Faro in open curiosity; the shuttle doors latched at the same moment that all the remaining technicians — and Faro, Xoxtin, and Narwen — took a few giant steps back and situated themselves behind a red line painted on the hangar floor.

The heat shields flared to life a moment later; the shuttle’s engine followed shortly after that. It was gone without a sound.

At Faro’s side, Narwen’s back was straight, her posture military-perfect. Her face gave nothing away.

“Ma’am,” she said, voice steady.

“Walk with me,” Faro said.

* * *

She didn’t offer much in the way of explanation; she dropped Narwen off at the sick bay only after she’d retrieved an extra datapad and sent orders on to Nerric, telling him what to look for. Faro sat in the waiting area, nose buried in sensor data sent back by the survey team, while Narwen submitted without question to the neural scanner. Her face was stoic as she was led away; she didn’t protest or ask for an explanation. Thrawn had chosen his proxy well.

The ion discharge worked, as Thrawn had predicted it would. Onscreen, Faro watched the mutasteel cramp and freeze into position, locking the temple and keeping it stationary as the TIEs scrambled and the shuttle searched for a place to land. She glanced up, saw nobody waiting to update her on Narwen’s status, and reached out to Thrawn instead.

He wasn’t in his office anymore. A quick scan of his surroundings told her everything she needed to know — overwhelmed by pain and too much stimulation, he’d made his way to the power cell again and sat there alone, a datapad propped up in his hands. As she watched, he banished the same sensor data Faro had just finished studying and, hand trembling, pulled up the linguistic reports instead. He was wearing his Grand Admiral’s tunic, Faro noticed; a probe of his memories showed her that Rukh had helped him with the sealing strip and boots, but when she searched for anything else that had happened while the barricade was down, she came up short.

 _Narwen’s in the neuromodulator,_ Faro told him, hoping to inspire a hint of guilt.

Thrawn paused, his hand hovering over the display. With a sense of unconvincing calm, he pulled his hand back and covered his chin instead. Barely a second later, Faro felt a phantom pain in her own hand as Thrawn put his injured fingertips between his teeth and bit down.

 _Why is Narwen in the neuromodulator?_ he asked. 

The neat network of ciphers in his mind was focused on the linguistic reports, studying everything he’d been given at an orderly pace. The other part of his mind — the storm of emotions always lurking just beneath the surface — recoiled in distaste at Faro’s words, forcing back unwanted memories of the modulator; he seemed to view it with the same animalistic fear with which Faro viewed feeding tubes.

 _Scanning for contamination,_ Faro said. _Changes in her brain patterns; leftover influence from the mutasteel._

Thrawn didn’t respond for a moment. He checked the shuttle’s timetable and progress; his memories swirled around an image of a frozen splinter of grass stuck in Narwen’s thumb. 

_I see,_ he said. _And when will she be finished?_

 _So you can give her another secret mission?_ asked Faro, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. Thrawn clenched his jaw, a spike of pain boring through his temple and then grinding into his wrists and ankles all at once. Holding his breath, he curled his knees up to his chest and dropped the datapad, letting it fall into his lap. 

Inside the sick bay, the door to the neural therapy unit clanked open and Commander Nerric exited, shooting Faro a nod of acknowledgment on his way past.

 _Two hours, give or take,_ Faro said. She set her jaw, trying to hold onto her anger, but the longer Thrawn stayed curled up, his breath hissing out of him shallow and fast, the more she could feel her outrage fading against her will. _Are you alright?_ she asked. Then, to cover up her own concern with a little jab, _Overextend yourself, perhaps?_

She could see Thrawn noticing her concern anyway. He tucked his head against his knees, fingers curled at the back of his neck and tangled in his hair. Pain traveled through his mind like a tremor of tectonic plates, jarring his thoughts and memories but not quite shaking them apart. She watched as he bared his teeth, ground his face instinctively against his knees the same way an animal might burrow underground for safety — and then, unbelievably, he squinched one eye open and tried to keep reading the reports through the pain.

 _Do I need to come get you?_ Faro asked, letting some exasperation bleed into her tone.

Thrawn recognized this as some sort of joke, vaguely remembered Vanto telling him this was a common phrase used by human parents, but Faro could see him seriously considering it nonetheless. 

_I’ll make it back,_ he said, but flickers of uncertainty lit up his mind as he thought of the long walk back to his office. _Rukh_ , he told himself, not meaning for Faro to overhear; he could call Rukh if he needed help. No need to bother medical staff—

 _You won’t bother them,_ Faro protested.

—or Faro, he thought, then realized Faro was listening in on that side of his brain and closed his eyes in chagrin. He overrode all thoughts of the walk back with a flood of data from the reports he’d just read. 

In the sick bay, Faro stared blankly at her datapad, unsure what to say. She glanced up as Nerric walked past, tossed him a questioning look. Got nothing in return. When she checked in on Thrawn again, he was gritting his teeth through the pain and trying to swipe through the reports on his datapad; a spark of electricity zapped his finger every time he touched the screen.

This wouldn’t be a problem if he’d gone planetside, he thought. If he’d made it to the chair—

A wave of grief swept through his thoughts, all-consuming and inexplicable. Faro jolted back in her chair, shocked by the sheer power of it; it was like all at once, everyone Thrawn cared about had died. But the emotion wasn’t connected to death, wasn’t connected to anyone at all — it seemed to stem entirely from the chair, from the crawling sense of need beneath Thrawn’s skin, from the fact that he was _here_ , in the power core, and the chair was still planet-side. Unattainable. Abandoned.

Alone.

Thrawn choked out a word Faro couldn’t make out, his thoughts so fogged that she couldn’t tell what it might have been; he cast his datapad aside just as blue sparks erupted all over it with a crack of energy that left smoke and the scent of melted circuits in the air. The same blue sparks wreathed his fingers, traveled up his forearms, sizzled out of existence before they reached his elbows — and Thrawn leaned forward, clutching at the collar of his tunic, ripping it open in an effort to catch his breath. 

This wasn’t working, Faro thought, springing to her feet. Her limbs trembled with nervous energy; she couldn’t just sit here waiting on Narwen’s results when Thrawn was suffering in the power core on his own. She lifted her comlink on her way out, raised it to her lips.

“Rukh, the Grand Admiral needs you,” she said.

The answer came in Rukh’s signature gravelly voice, but it didn’t come from the comlink — it came from Faro’s right elbow. She whirled around with a cry of surprise just in time to see Rukh materialize at her side. 

“He has not summoned me,” Rukh growled.

“You’ve been _watching_ me?” Faro said. For a moment, she forgot herself and tried to project a mental image to Rukh of Thrawn, alone in the power core. “ _Me_? Do you have any idea where the admiral is right now?”

“My orders—” Rukh started.

“Well, follow me,” Faro said, cutting him off. She was too irritated to argue with him; she motioned for him to follow and could only trust that he did, as she couldn’t hear his footsteps following her down the hall. With her mind connected to Thrawn’s, Faro set a moderate pace, keeping an eye on him but taking care not to appear rushed.

People were already talking about her sprint to the hangar bay earlier that day. 

She let her mind loosen up, curling back toward Thrawn automatically; his position had changed since she last checked on him, but his breathing was easier, the cool durasteel of the deck against his cheek serving to ground him. His eyes were hooded, fixed on the heat shield around the power core, listening to it thrum. He could see a flex of light that Faro couldn’t — except now, looking through his eyes — and he forced himself to focus on that instead of the tightness in his chest and the tension wavering up and down his body.

She turned away from his physical state and looked at his mind instead, found a disconcerting fog creeping over his thoughts. The few clear areas in his brain spiraled toward one item: the mutasteel throne on the planet below.

Pulling back from Thrawn, she heard herself say with a hissing inhalation, “You should have stayed with him.”

Rukh glanced at her sideways, didn’t answer right away. He waited until they were out of earshot of the technicians down the corridor. 

“I had my orders,” he said.

 _“Orders_ , yes,” said Faro, her jaw clenching without her permission. “But you’re not his subordinate, Rukh. You’re his bodyguard. It’s your duty to keep him safe.”

She couldn’t stand to look at him — feared she’d lose the tight control she had over her face if she did — but she could see his eyes narrowing as _he_ looked at _her_.

“There is nothing I can do to protect my master from his mind,” said Rukh, his voice low and full of reproach; Faro felt the heat in her cheeks cool so suddenly that it left her cheeks stinging from the change. “That is _your_ duty,” Rukh continued, twisting the knife.

And then, before Faro could process the surge of grief and frustration that welled inside her at those words, Rukh added:

“And even if it was not your duty, your presence has a far greater impact on him than mine.”

Faro looked at him sharply; Rukh’s eyes shunted away, his face impassive, almost mulish in his lack of interest in her response. Another group of technicians appeared down the hall, preventing any further attempts at conversation until they were well past.

“What do you mean?” asked Faro, her voice low and unconcerned.

Rukh shot her an unimpressed look. “I can smell your pulse quickening,” he said smugly.

Oh, if only she were fast enough, she would kick him right in his little gray ass. 

“Just as I can smell your frustration and concern,” Rukh continued, moving casually out of her reach as he spoke. Faro was barely listening to him; she tried to push Rukh’s words out of her mind entirely and focus on her mission instead — an easy mindset to slip into after years of Imperial service — but then, as if he could sense that he needed to up the ante, Rukh said, “My master’s scent changes when he is distressed. It changes too when he is comforted.”

Seeing Faro stare at him, he turned his eyes away.

“Simple biology,” he said. “All Noghri can smell the natural fluctuations of emotion.”

“Tell me what emotion you’re smelling off me right now,” Faro encouraged him.

Wisely, Rukh moved to the other side of the hallway. He maintained a good distance of two meters between himself and Faro all the way to the power core, which was perfectly fine in Faro’s opinion. It gave her the space to return to Thrawn mentally, to more thoroughly keep an eye on his condition. 

And to reach out to him.

 _Sir,_ she said casually, her tone professional, as if he weren’t curled up on the deck and breathing shallowly. _Did you note the sensor data sent by the TIE fighters?_

Thrawn’s mind flexed in confusion, his thoughts of the chair breaking up. Images of TIE fighters invaded his brain a half-second before he parsed Faro’s words and remembered why they were significant. 

_I did,_ he said hesitantly, his voice far away. His memory of the reports was vague — an alarming development, Faro thought, because she knew he’d been studying those exact reports when she spoke to him from the sick bay.

 _And what did you think of them?_ she asked.

Fog swirled in his mind, revealing glimpses of mutasteel every time it receded. Thrawn pushed through it sluggishly, his cheek and palm pressed flat against the floor, his other hand curled loosely around his collar. It was like watching someone swim through mud — fully clothed, with boots on — and not being able to help. 

With effort, Thrawn uncovered a flash of memory — a quick, unreadable image of the report — and strained himself so badly to parse the foreign symbols into words that his headache spiked, pain blinding him. He gave a quiet hiss, palm tensing against the deck. The pain was so intense that Faro’s step hitched, her eyes shifting from side to side as she watched him, waiting anxiously to assess the damage.

But the pain faded, and with a tight, controlled sigh, Thrawn cast its remnants aside and returned to the TIE fighter report. He could make out individual words here and there, but the rest of it was obscured by the fog, so he tucked that brief flash of memory into his pocket and sought out others instead.

The TIE fighters were disabling the temple, he thought—

_(the temple, the chair)_

—and try as he might, he couldn’t remember how that had panned out, but afterward, afterward they had an exercise to complete. What time was it? Had they finished already? Sent a report to him on that as well?

 _The training maneuvers,_ Thrawn said, focusing on this small success, ignoring the overall failures of his mind. _How are they progressing?_

 _Lieutenant Anson’s overseeing the maneuver,_ Faro informed him. _Commander Skerris is leading from the hangar bay._

And if anything had gone wrong, she would have told him right away, Thrawn thought, so he absorbed this information and held it close to his chest, using it to keep the fog at bay. Through a deep-body ache, he stretched out his free hand and grabbed his datapad; a pervasive weakness throbbed through every limb, preventing him from sitting up. But he could at least tilt the datapad toward him, try to focus on its screen.

His heartbeat slowed. His throat was still tight; there was a lump caught there that ached so badly he knew he couldn’t speak if he tried, allowed himself a moment of gratitude that no one was here to check on him and demand a verbal response. It had happened more than once during his time in sick bay; he’d been forced to say nothing, to stare at the medics coldly until they took his silence for arrogance and left him alone, but—

The medics he was picturing weren’t human, Faro noted. They had blue skin and red eyes, and wore dark uniforms that didn’t match Imperial wear at all. She steered his mind so that he turned his head, caught sight of himself in a mirror across the remembered hospital room — a younger version of Thrawn, his face unlined, his throat swathed in bandages.

Thrawn’s eyes widened — not his physical eyes, but the eyes of his memory-self — as if the reflection startled him. His gaze darted down to his injured throat; the memory broke apart a moment later, lost to the fog. Back in the present, at least for now, he stared at the heat shield and tightened his grip on his collar instinctively, not seeming to notice that his fingers had clenched in the material hard enough to turn his knuckles a shade of blue so pale it was almost white.

He couldn’t last like this much longer, Faro thought, but it didn’t matter; she was already hitting the access pad to the power core.

It was one thing to know Thrawn was lying on the floor, Faro thought, her breath catching in her throat, but it was another thing entirely to see him crumpled there, his pristine uniform wrinkled, his hair in disarray. She hurried to his side, her knees crashing against the deck, her fingers going straight to his neck to take his pulse. She had to fight with his clenched hands to get there; he scarcely seemed to realize who she was at first, and only tightened his grip on his collar.

She felt his chest tightening, heart hammering, the urge to fight warring with the immovable weight of his limbs — and then her face sharpened in his mind.

 _Just Faro,_ he thought. 

The panic eased; he loosened his grip on his collar, let her help him into a sitting position with his back against the wall. His eyes tracked sideways.

 _Only Rukh,_ he thought. 

But unlike his realization that Faro was close by, this new observation had no noticeable effect on his mental state, negative or positive. He leaned against her heavily, his shoulder pressing against Faro’s as he re-oriented himself, regained his familiarity with the room. His breath was still coming out short, but his eyes were sharp again, his mind still swirling but nowhere near as opaque. 

“I don’t need the sick bay,” he said aloud, his voice ragged. His eyes were on Rukh; he seemed to be talking to Faro. She hesitated, one hand on his upper arm for support; she could see a sheen of cold sweat on his neck and in his hair, but his uniform was thick enough that none of it had soaked through.

“You’re certain?” she asked. “Can you stand?”

He didn’t answer; through their connection, she could see that the answer was _yes, but not yet_ — he needed a moment to let the adrenaline fade. She wasn’t sure how — if it came through their mental link or if she could physically feel it where their bodies touched — but she could tell he was shaking slightly from reaction.

 _The chair,_ he thought.

The tremors increased, became a shudder, faded away again. His thoughts were so intensely focused on the temple that Faro almost didn’t hear him speaking, his voice low and rough. 

“Not the most dignified position I’ve been found in,” he said. Half a joke, half an apology. Faro frowned at him; her only response was to run her hand down his arm and rest it lightly on his elbow, offering a warm, steady point of balance. Over by the entranceway, Rukh had planted himself on one side of the door and was scanning the passageway, keeping an eye out for intruders — but he cast a quick glance Faro’s way, a knowing look on his face.

For all that Thrawn trusted him, Rukh was quickly becoming Faro’s least favorite person. She was pretty sure he ranked somewhere just below Admiral Konstantine and just above Darth Vader in her mind right now. She gave him a quelling scowl, and by the time she turned back to Thrawn, he’d caught his breath and was turning his arm around in her grasp, sneaking a glance at his chrono. 

He was in the middle of a countdown; as soon as Faro turned to look at him, his eyes flicked up, meeting hers with cool dignity at total odds with how she’d found him. A second later, the fog came back, swooping down over his thoughts, drudging up images of the chair— 

“Too late,” said Faro, jerking her arm away as if she'd been burned. She staggered to her feet, momentarily caught off-balance. Her mouth was dry. She faced the power core for a moment, imagining the flexes of light Thrawn could see but she could not, and then turned back to face him with her hands clenched at her sides in perfect military posture, her face a mask.

Smoothly, with all the grace of a healthy, seasoned warrior, Thrawn rose to his feet. His ankles twinged, but he didn’t lean against the wall for support, and the fog was gone; he’d realized after one look at her face that there was no point keeping it up.

“You were faking,” Faro said. There was no note of disbelief in her voice; only resignation.

Thrawn glanced away from her as if it didn’t matter. Inside his mind, Faro watched him carefully box up the terrible memories he’d dragged out in the first place to induce such a state — the memory of an explosion on an alien ship that still made him break out in a cold sweat if he thought about it long enough — the feeling of an invisible hand against his throat — the twist of mutasteel boring through his bones, tickling the back of his eyes— 

The memories didn’t affect him now. He tucked them away without a hint of his earlier anxiety and stood there with his arms crossed, chewing the inside of his cheek as he thought.

“Excellent work, Rukh,” he murmured, still ignoring Faro. He flicked his hand in dismissal and Rukh disappeared at once, his cloaking device shimmering to life. 

“What were you planning?” Faro asked, her voice sounding hollow to her own ears. Really, what she should have asked was, _What have you done?_ She knew it, but she couldn't bring herself to say the words. The panic attack, the tremors, it had all been real; he'd put himself through that willingly, actively induced it...all to get at the mutasteel chair?

Thrawn turned his head slightly, absorbed every minuscule twitch of emotion on Faro’s face in less than a second. From inside his head, she caught a cold, defensive wave of anti-guilt as he refused to let her reaction affect him. His heart jumped in his chest, an echo of all the stress he'd just put his nervous system through; an echo he chose to ignore. 

“Chief Narwen will be finished with the neuromodulator by now,” he said, his voice even, a grim satisfaction in his eye. “And I have a training exercise to see to. Finish your business as you see fit, Commodore; I’ll be on the bridge.”


End file.
